Cinema Sojourns

The biggest box office hit of 1955 in England and honored with three BAFTA nominations for Best British Film, Best British Screenplay and Best Film from any Source, The Dam Busters (1955) is less well known in the U.S. but is nonetheless one of the most realistic and faithful accounts of an incident in WWII that is credited with hastening Germany’s defeat in the war.

One of the German dams destroyed by an RAF squadron in WW2 during “Operation Chastise.”

On May 16, 1943, the newly formed 617 Squadron under the command of Guy Gibson launched “Operation Chastise,” a covert operation that attacked the Ruhr dams in Germany under the light of a full moon. The resulting damage was extensive and a major blow to the German war machine forcing that nation to dedicate more resources to the defense of key installations while trying to rebuild the Ruhr dams at the same time. The toll on the British side was considerable as well; of the 133 flyers who departed from the Scampton, England airbase that fateful night, only 73 returned. Yet, it was the bravery of the men and their heroic mission that triumphed in a British victory that strengthened the country’s morale during a dark period.Unlike most of the war movies of its era, The Dam Busters was atypical in its presentation of the events. Taking a much more documentary-like approach, the film is divided into two sections. The first concentrates on the development and laborious testing of the “bouncing bomb” (created by British engineer Barnes Wallis) that skipped across water, avoiding torpedo nets and creating earthquake-like damage upon detonation with dams; the second section details the carefully orchestrated preparations for the mission and its execution.

A scene from the classic British war drama The Dam Busters (1955), directed by Michael Anderson and starring Richard Todd & Michael Redgrave.

Shot in black and white by cinematographer Erwin Hillier in order to more fully integrate stock footage and give it the immediacy of a newsreel, The Dam Busters also avoided any fabricated romantic subplots for box office insurance, choosing instead to focus solely on the facts and the participants involved, all of whom were played by a first rate British cast.

Dr. Wallis (Michael Redgrave, center) explains the secret mission to RAF squadron members in The Dam Busters (1955).

Michael Redgrave, who plays Dr. Wallis in the film, relished his part because it allowed him “to create a character totally different from my own.” In his autobiography, In My Mind’s Eye, he wrote, “It was Barnes Wallis himself, incidentally, who gave me the clue to my performance in The Dam Busters, a film which I enjoyed making more than any since The Browning Version (1951). We were introduced, and Wallis, who was a good deal shorter than I and rather slim, burst out laughing. We ‘clicked’ at once. At our second meeting I said, “I’m not going to mimic you, you know.’ His reply was interesting, not so much because he was evidently relieved as for what it showed of the method he would use to tackle a problem, even in the field of acting. ‘No, of course. Your problem is not to imitate a person, but to create him.’ It illustrated, I thought, his scientific approach to the very essence of what he was considering. A quality – not at all to be confused with the stereotype of the absent-minded professor – of setting aside everything but the essential, which must have driven him on and sustained him through countless set-backs and disappointments.”

“The Dam Busters”
Richard Todd
1955 Warner Brothers

Richard Todd, who was cast in the role of Wing Commander Guy Gibson, was a rising star in both British and American films of the fifties, having already received a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his performance in The Hasty Heart [1949]. At first he had some concerns about the choice of director for The Dam Busters. Michael Anderson had spent most of his career as a second unit director and had only helmed a few low-budget programmers when he was tapped by executive producer Robert Clark to direct his first major film. The Dam Busters turned out to be an important calling card for Anderson and led to his selection by Michael Todd to direct the even more lavish and ambitious epic, Around the World in 80 Days [1956].

An RAF squadron pilot zeros in on his target in the British aviation war drama, The Dam Busters (1955).

In preparation for The Dam Busters, Todd recalled in his memoirs In Camera, “Together Michael and I saw footage of the special effects photography that had already been shot and which was crucial to the making of the film. Without believable shots of the actual demolition of the dams there could be no picture, and I was amazed how realistically the special effects boys had contrived the explosions, the collapse of the two enormous stone dams and the release of vast torrents of water…And together we also met and talked with many of those who had been connected with the famous raid, including the pilot Guy Gibson’s widow, Eve, and his frail old father; Mickey Martin….and above all Dr. Barnes Wallis, inventor of the ‘bouncing’ bomb. Sherriff [the screenwriter], too, had met them and there was not a line of dialogue or a single incident enacted on the screen which was not true to the events.”

A behind the scenes production still of a special effects technician inspecting a miniature dam for the WW2 epic, The Dam Busters (1955).

The special effects work, the scripting and the preparation of the aircraft scenes alone took almost two years before production began on The Dam Busters. A large part of the budget was also consumed by the RAF [the Royal Air Force of the United Kingdom] which supplied bombers and pilots to the studio, Associated British, at a cost of 130 pounds per hour per plane. According to one source, “The 150 hours of flying time accounted for roughly 10% of the budget.” Most of the movie was shot in the Peak District, in the north of England, and at the RAF Hemswell in Lincolnshire.

A production still taken during the making of The Dam Busters (1955), directed by Michael Anderson.

“The actual shots of the Wellington bomber dropping its huge dambusters,” noted Todd in his autobiography, “were cleverly contrived by Michael Anderson from some rather poor-quality archive film shot in 1943 during the original tests. He framed it in such a way as to make it appear that it was seen by us through our binoculars, which explained the difference in quality of the 1943 material.”

Richard Todd prepares to attack key Nazi targets in the British aviation war drama, The Dam Busters (1955).

As for Todd’s own scenes during the flying sequences, he recalled, “My first few days in the studios were spent strapped into the pilot’s seat in a Lancaster fuselage…The greatest difficulty for me and for other crew members who had to be photographed in the aircraft was lack of space. The Lancaster fuselage was cramped and bristling with instrumentation at any time, but with the addition of the camera, lights, cables, microphones, camera and sound crews there was scarcely room to breathe. And it was dreadfully hot, too, as we sweated in our helmets and Mae West jackets. It was I, perforce, who spent most of the time in these conditions. Once I was in my seat, there was no means of getting out again until all the equipment had been removed, so for days on end I was strapped in by about 8:15 am, released for lunch and re-incarcerated from about 2 pm until the end of shooting at 6 pm. The needs of nature occasionally caused total chaos and a lengthy hold-up.” It was all worth the extra effort and uncomfortable conditions because The Dam Busters was not only a huge financial success but was praised by the critics. “Excuse me while I rave about the finest flying picture I’ve seen,” wrote Reg Whitley in the Daily Mirror and Dilys Powell, in the Sunday Times, said “Mr. Anderson has handled the final scenes in particular with sympathy, and understatement is never allowed to become the cliché it often is in British films of this kind.” In the U.S., the film was well received also with the Variety review typical of its reception: “…told with painstaking attention to detail…The production is a personal triumph for Michael Anderson. Michael Redgrave, particularly, gives a vividly human portrayal of Dr. Barnes Wallis the scientist while Richard Todd makes a distinguished showing as Guy Gibson the RAF commander.” In addition, The Dam Busters was nominated for an Oscar® for Best Special Effects.

Robert Shaw (left) and Richard Todd star in the British WW2 drama The Dam Busters (1955), based on a real-life secret mission.

When watching The Dam Busters keep your eyes peeled for brief appearances by Robert Shaw as Flight Sergeant Pulford, George Baker (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service [1969], The Spy Who Loved Me [1977]) as Flight Lt. Maltby, John Fraser (Tunes of Glory [1960], Repulsion [1965]) as Flight Lt. Hopgood, and Patrick McGoohan as a guard. In Roger Langley’s biography Patrick McGoohan: Danger Man or Prisoner?, the actor admitted, “The first time I found myself on a film set was for The Dam Busters. I had exactly one day’s filming and perhaps five lines.”

Richard Todd (left) and Michael Redgrave star in The Dam Busters (1955), a British war drama based on a real-life secret mission.

When The Dam Busters was released in the U.S., “Warners employed an editing short cut,” according to Peter Van Gelder in That’s Hollywood, “that raised questions in the House of Commons. In two years of preparation for filming the makers aspired to absolute accuracy about the raids, even going so far as to send a copy of the completed script to every surviving member of the Squadron for vetting. But in trimming the action down for the American market the Warners editors spliced in an extra shot of a plane crashing. The only example they could find was a USAF Flying Fortress. This was immediately seized upon by pedantic, mid-fifties Can You Spot-ters and the two offending seconds were promptly excised.”

Wing Commander Guy Gibson (Richard Todd) and his beloved dog with the offensive name in The Dam Busters (1955).

There was one more minor detail about The Dam Busters that gave Warners pause and it was Guy Gibson’s devoted dog who was beloved by the entire 617 squadron and was named Nigger. In some markets the hound’s name was dubbed as Trigger for obvious reasons.

Director Peter Jackson (far right) is an aviation military buff who wanted to remake The Dam Busters for years.

Director Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings trilogy), an avid military aviation buff, toyed with producing his own remake of the classic 1955 war epic over a ten year period but finally gave up after failing to raise the necessary production funds. This is noted in Ian Nathan’s recently published book, Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson & The Making of Middle-Earth. In January 2012 Lionsgate released a DVD edition of the film as a stand alone title with no extras. If you own an all-region Blu-Ray player, a better option would be the 75^th Anniversary restoration from Studiocanal, which was released in June 2018 and is available from various online distributors.

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

Other website links of interest:

https://gointothestory.blcklst.com/how-they-write-a-script-paddy-chayefsky-2912eee0e9f7

https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/medium-rarity-1.456279

https://www.dga.org/Craft/VisualHistory/Interviews/Arthur-Hiller.aspx

https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/george-c-scott-in-memoriam

https://tv.avclub.com/diana-rigg-on-the-avengers-mrs-peel-game-of-thrones-1798281429

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HftRP0NAJYg

A Union soldier prepares a noose for an accused saboteur in An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, an episode in the three part film, Au Coeur de la vie (In the Midst of Life, 1963).

Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Jessamyn West’s The Friendly Persuasion, Walt Whitman’s collection of poems Drum-Taps and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind are among some of the most famous examples of historical fiction and literature about the American Civil War. More recent works would have to include Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Michael Shaara’s trilogy (Gods and Generals, The Killer Angels and The Last Full Measure) but some of the most evocative and unsentimental writing about the War Between the States can be found in the Civil War short stories of Ambrose Bierce, who served in the Union Army’s 9^th Indiana Volunteer Infantry. I find it surprising that no major American feature films have been based on his work yet several of his short stories have been adapted for the screen in Poland, England and France. And the most memorable one of all remains Robert Enrico’s Au Coeur de la Vie (In the Midst of Life, 1963).

Rod Serling, the host of The Twilight Zone TV series, presented the American broadcast premiere of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, directed by Robert Enrico.

Featuring three of Bierce’s most famous short stories – Chickamauga, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and The Mocking-Bird, the film attracted the attention of Twilight Zone host Rod Serling, an avid Ambrose Bierce fan, after An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge won Best Short Subject at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival and then an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Subject in 1963. Serling purchased the screen rights to this episode in Enrico’s trilogy and arranged for the American TV premiere in the 5^th season of The Twilight Zone in February of 1964.

Douglas Kennedy plays a Union officer in a TV adaptation of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge that was aired as part of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” in 1959.

This was not the first TV adaptation of Bierce’s story. Alfred Hitchcock Presents had aired a version of the story in December 1959 starring Ronald Howard in the title role of Peyton Farquhar and Juano Hernandez, Kenneth Tobey, Douglas Kennedy and James Coburn in supporting roles. Although An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge was only 27 minutes long, Serling still had to edit out two minutes from the film to fit into a 30 minute time slot with commercial interruptions for CBS. He also added an introduction and an epilogue as the host and it was this broadcast that introduced most American viewers to Enrico’s film, though it was only a third of the director’s original concept.

Cinematographer Jean Boffety

Although Chickamauga, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and The Mocking-Bird were all filmed separately during 1961-1962 and exhibited as short subjects at some film festivals, the three films fit together seamlessly as a trilogy and was released to theaters in 1963 (In the Midst of Life was showcased at the 1963 New York Film Festival). The three films share some of the same actors and most of the key crew members including cinematographer Jean Boffety (pictured above) and music composer Henri Lanoe. Interestingly enough, Lanoe is much better known in the French film industry as a film editor with such credits as Pierre Etaix’s Yoyo (1965), Louis Malle’s The Thief of Paris (1967) and Joseph Losey’s Mr. Klein (1976).

Pierre Boffety (son of cinematographer Jean Boffety) plays a six year old boy who wanders into the bloody battlefield of Chickamauga, the first tale in the three part film, Au Coeur de la vie (In the Midst of Life, 1963).

Exquisitely photographed in luminous black and white and featuring Boffety’s son Pierre as the young boy protagonist Johny, Chickamauga opens the trilogy with a grim recap of what happened at the battle of Chickamauga, a three-day campaign that is considered one of the bloodiest clashes in the war and resulted in the deaths of over 35,000 Union and Confederate soldiers. The ominous tone continues with a montage of disturbing woodcuts reflective of our nation’s bloody history involving Native Americans and slavery, all of it accompanied by a blues singer crooning, “Little boy, you got war as a heritage….” [Be forewarned: spoilers ahead].

The creek at Chickamauga where one of the most violent and bloody battles of the Civil War was fought.

While Bierce’s original story is much more descriptive of the graphic violence, death and destruction that occurred at Chickamauga, it also veers into the surreal and Enrico’s adaptation accents this, achieving a hallucinatory, dream-like quality at times punctuated by an occasional nightmarish image.

Dead and wounded Union soldiers cover the ground in this nightmarish image from Chickamauga, the first tale in the three part film, Au Coeur de la vie (In the Midst of Life, 1963).

When we are first introduced to Johny (he is unnamed in the original story), we see him riding his black servant Willie like a horse while brandishing his toy sword. Willie is soon called away for household work by Johny’s mother and the little boy angrily wanders into the woods where distant gunfire can be heard. When his father comes searching for him, Johny hides and eventually falls asleep, awaking at dusk to encounter scenes of carnage that he cannot really process as reality.

A bloody Union soldier appears as a clown drummer in the Chickamauga portion of the Civil War trilogy Au Coeur de la vie (In the Midst of Life, 1963), directed by Robert Enrico.

As he wanders through a landscape of charred woodlands and smoking timbers, he notices something crawling. Through his eyes, it first looks like a pig or a chained bear but soon he realizes it is a soldier moving on all fours over the muddy ground. Dozens of other wounded and maimed soldiers emerge to form a crawling procession that tries to make its way toward the creek. But for Johny, everything is like a game of make-believe. A wounded drummer with a bloodied face appears to him as a circus clown. The boy inspects a real saber from a dead man and briefly plays with a bugle from another corpse. He even attempts to ride piggy-back on a wounded Union soldier before being tossed off. None of the horrors seem to register until Johny returns home to find his house in flames. Even then he picks through the rubble and throws things into the fire. It isn’t until he finds his mother dead on the ground that he begins to perceive what has happened. The episode ends with the boy blankly staring into the void (In the original story, the boy is revealed to be a deaf mute who was isolated in his own world).

An example of Jean Boffety’s atmospheric cinematography in Robert Enrico’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1961).

Enrico’s Chickamauga captures the physical horrors of the infamous battle and the aspect that makes it even more haunting is the bucolic setting. Amid the sights and sounds of nature (flowing stream, insects and birds, the rustling wind in the trees), death is everywhere, all of it man-made. This visual duality of human suffering amid the beauty of nature is a key component of Enrico’s trilogy and Boffety’s lyrical cinematography makes it even more disorienting.

Pierre Boffety is revealed to be a deaf mute at the disturbing climax of Chickamauga, the first tale in the three part film, Au Coeur de la vie (In the Midst of Life, 1963) from French director Robert Enrico.

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, the second story in the trilogy, is probably the most fantastical of the tales with a twist ending which reveals that most of what has transpired exists only in the imagination of the protagonist, Peyton Farquhar – an accused railroad saboteur who faces hanging by Union officers.

Roger Jacquet plays an accused saboteur slated for executive in An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1961), which is featured in Robert Enrico’s Civil War trilogy Au Coeur de la vie (In the Midst of Life), based on short stories by Ambrose Bierce.

Most viewers who saw the film on The Twilight Zone know that An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge begins with the condemned man being prepared for execution (it omits the prisoner’s backstory from the original Bierce tale). As the prisoner is dropped from the hanging platform, however, the gallows rope breaks free from the bridge rafter and the man is plunged into the river. He is then carried downstream away from the Union officers and their guns. He manages to free his bonds underwater, kick off his heavy boots and eventually make his way through the forest toward his plantation.

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge was the second story in Robert Enrico’s Civil War trilogy Au Coeur de la vie (In the Midst of Life), based on short stories by Ambrose Bierce.

The prisoner’s miraculous escape breaks the doom-laden tension of the story and segues into something exhilarating and unexpected. The lovely folk ballad, “Living Man,” also adds poignancy to the prisoner’s trek toward freedom. It is only as he races toward his wife with open arms that we realize it is all an illusion. At the moment his wife touches him, Farquhar is pulled back by some unseen force and we see the final instant of his death with his neck snapping. The transition is especially shocking and powerful since escape is revealed to be a cruel narrative trick.

An escaped prisoner imagines his wife is running toward him in the twist ending of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1961), directed by Robert Enrico.

The final segment of the trilogy, The Mocking-Bird, has a macabre, ghostly quality to it and for most of its length it proceeds like a mystery. We don’t know much about Private Greyrock except that he didn’t desert his post in the depths of the forest unlike most of his fellow soldiers. Although he is rewarded by his commanding officer for his courage and given temporary leave from his unit, he continues to replay a night shooting incident in his mind. Did he really hear something and actually shoot another soldier in the darkness? Greyrock wanders deep into the woods, trying to retrace his steps from the evening before. He falls asleep and dreams of his childhood when he and his twin brother led an idyllic existence on their plantation. Their mother indulged them and they roamed free in the countryside, digging up worms on the riverbank, racing through meadows and teaching songs to their pet mockingbird. But the mother’s unexpected death brought an end to the life they had known and the brothers were separated and sent to live with different relatives.

The final story in the Ambrose Bierce Civil War trilogy is The Mocking-Bird, which is featured in the three part film, Au Coeur de la vie (In the Midst of Life, 1963), directed by Robert Enrico.

When Greyrock wakes up to the sound of a mockingbird, it eventually leads him to his previous post where he fired the shot. Nearby he discovers the body of a dead Confederate soldier at the base of an uprooted tree. He looks at the face and it is a doppleganger of himself. Greyrock is finally reunited with his twin brother.

Twin brothers are separated after the death of their mother, resulting in a fateful encounter years later in The Mocking-Bird, which is featured in the three part film, Au Coeur de la vie (In the Midst of Life, 1963), directed by Robert Enrico.

The Mocking-Bird, more than the other two stories, addresses a terrible truth about the Civil War that became a commonplace reality for family members fighting on opposite sides of the war. It was inevitable that fathers, sons and brothers might kill each other in battle but Enrico’s adaptation dramatizes this as an eerie encounter that verges on the supernatural.

Portrait of the French director Robert ENRICO in June 1967. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

Robert Enrico enjoyed widespread critical acclaim for In the Midst of Life outside France and around the world but the film was barely distributed and few people saw it at theaters. Also, Enrico was not considered part of the recent New Wave movement and that may have affected his career adversely. Unlike the often spontaneous and improvised non-traditional filmmaking of directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut and Jacques Rivette, Enrico’s Civil War trilogy was a tightly scripted, literary adaptation that looked like a polished studio production. The subject matter was also distinctly American whereas most of the New Wave directors were focused on contemporary France, often set on the streets of Paris with young actors in movies like The 400 Blows, Breathless and Paris Belongs to Us.

Enrico followed In the Midst of Life with La Belle Vie (The Good Life, 1963), an impressionistic portrait of an ex-soldier returning to Paris after serving in the Algerian War. Because it addressed such an unpopular topic with the French government and moviegoers, La Belle Vie was doomed to fail but it might look like some undiscovered masterpiece today…if only it was available for viewing.

For better or worse, Enrico soon gravitated toward commercial projects that proved to be quite popular with French audiences, especially a run of comedy-adventures and crime dramas featuring such major stars as Lino Ventura (The Wise Guys, 1965), Alain Delon (The Last Adventure, 1967), Jean-Paul Belmondo (Ho!, 1968) and Brigitte Bardot (Rum Runners, 1971).

Occasionally Enrico would score a modest success with an art-house effort like Zita (1968), a New Wave influenced story of a woman (Joanna Shimkus, wife of Sidney Poitier) contemplating the death of her aunt as she wanders through the Paris twilight. The World War II drama, The Old Gun (1975) starring Philippe Noiret and Romy Schneider, also won awards and critical praise, and some cinema buffs tout For Those I Loved (1983) as a favorite late work; it was based on the true story of Polish Holocaust survivor Martin Gray and starred Michael York, Brigitte Fossey and Macha Meril. But none of these lead to wider exposure for Enrico’s work in the U.S. If Enrico is remembered at all today, it is for The Twilight Zone broadcast of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.

Ambrose Bierce was a satirist, author, journalist and Civil War veteran who disappeared in 1914 without a trace.

As for Ambrose Bierce, he is probably more famous for The Devil’s Dictionary than he is for his Civil War stories. Below are some typical entries from it that demonstrate his often wicked, misanthropic sense of humor:

Marriage: The state or condition of community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all two

Egotist: A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.

Cannibal: A gastronome of the old school who preserves the simple tastes and adheres to the natural diet of the pre-pork period.

Bierce would actually make an ideal subject for a biographical film and he remains an enigmatic figure today. In addition to having fought during the Civil War (including the battle of Chickamauga), he was a noted author, satirist, poet, editor and journalist of his era (he once wrote for William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner). Bierce’s contempt for religion, politics and social mores made him a highly controversial character and the end of his life is shrouded in mystery. He disappeared without a trace in 1914 after telling some of his peers he was going to Mexico to ride with Pancho Villa and report on his campaign. Rumors abound that he was either executed by a firing squad south of the border or committed suicide but no one really knows, although it is fascinating to read the many theories surround his death.

A dream-like image from Robert Enrico’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1961), based on the short story by Ambrose Bierce.

One thing is certain. Enrico’s In the Midst of Life is an excellent introduction to his work and a splendid visual recreation of Bierce’s insider perspective on the Civil War. Janus Films was the original distributor of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge so it is not unlikely that The Criterion Collection could make Enrico’s film available on Blu-Ray some day. Unfortunately, In the Midst of Life is not available in the U.S. on any format but if you own an all-region DVD player, you can still buy the French version (no English language or subtitle option) entitled La Riviere du Hibou from M6 Video via amazon.fr.

Other website links of interest:

https://theculturetrip.com/south-america/uruguay/articles/the-untold-story-of-ex-uruguayan-president-jose-mujica-the-leader-who-donated-his-wages-to-the-poor/

https://variety.com/2018/film/festivals/venice-film-festival-alvaro-brechner-a-twelve-year-night-1202922500/

https://readysteadycut.com/2018/12/28/twelve-year-night-netflix-review/

https://medium.com/swlh/7-valuable-life-lessons-from-the-president-of-uruguay-e91600dcd0fc

Every amateur detective has his own approach to crime solving but Mary Lee Ling consults the stars and birth dates to narrow down the list of suspects. When Were You Born? (1938) has a terrific premise for a detective thriller and was quite unusual in its day. Its offbeat approach to the genre is further enhanced by the casting of Anna May Wong in the central role of an astrologist whose connection to a murder victim implicates her in the police investigation.

While the film, directed by William McGann , is an unpretentious little B-unit programmer from Warner Bros., it manages, in its brief 66 minute running time, to incorporate a Rashomon-like flashback structure with multiple suspects and climaxes with a double twist ending. And even though Wong’s astrological interests and beliefs are often used in comic contrast to standard police procedures, When Were You Born? treats this age old practice with complete seriousness.

To lend the subject some credence, producer Bryan Foy even opens the movie with a prologue featuring noted mystic Manly P. Hall, the author of The Secret Teachings of All Ages: An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy (published in 1928). In fact, Hall wrote the original story on which screenwriter Anthony Coldewey based his script, which explains Lee Ling’s rather pedantic behavior around non-believers.

Famous astrology expert Manly P. Hall introduces When Were You Born? (1938), directed by William McGann.

Looking like some spooky charlatan out of William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley, Hall informs us, “A crime has been committed. Astrology can solve crime. It has solved many crimes in the past. Astrology is the strangest of the sciences but it is a science.”

Mother Shipton, English soothsayer and prophetess (1488-1561).

In support of this, Hall points to Mother Shipton, the famous English soothsayer of the 15^th century, whose predictions of the discovery of America, the gold rush in California, the invention of airplanes, submarines and several other events and inventions all came true. What has all of this to do with When Were You Born? Not much other then it’s just a gimmick that lends some exotic appeal to an otherwise standard whodunit.

The movie begins on a luxury liner returning from Hawaii to San Francisco. Aboard are Philip Corey (James Stephenson), a successful tycoon and importer of Chinese goods, his fiancee Nita (Lola Lane), his valet Shields (Eric Stanley) and Mary Lee Ling (Wong), who has befriended Nita. By the time the ship has disembarked, Corey has already broken his engagement with Nita and is trying to elude his shady business partner Fred Gow (British character actor Leonard Mudie).

Margaret Lindsay is the true star of the mystery thriller, When Were You Born? (1938), co-starring Anna May Wong.

The next day Corey is found dead and the newspaper headlines announce it as a suicide but the police know better and the parade of suspects includes Doris Kane (Margaret Lindsay), a woman who had been secretly involved with Corey. Before the whole affair ends in an ominous house with secret passageways, there are two more murders – one involving a silent gun that shoots jade fragments – and a plethora of details about the Zodiac signs.

Anna May Wong during her cinema heyday in the late 1920s-early 1930s.

Anna May Wong was well past her peak years as the most popular Chinese American actress in Hollywood when she starred in When Were You Born? She is actually second billed after Margaret Lindsay, even though her astrologer heroine is in almost every scene. Wong’s heyday was really the silent era though she is probably best known for her appearance opposite Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932). By the time she made When Were You Born?, she had slipped from A productions to B pictures though part of her shrinking popularity was due to the emerging international political climate that resulted in World War II.

A lobbycard from the 1938 crime drama When Were You Born? starring Anna May Wong.

Like Dietrich, Wong exuded a smoldering sensuality and dangerous allure in films such as Piccadilly (1929) and Daughter of the Dragon (1931) but as astrologer Lee Ling, she gives a surprisingly flat performance and comes off like some straitlaced schoolmarm, who alternates between officious behavior and mild irritation toward any naysayers.

Leonard Mudie and Anna May Wong are featured in the 1938 mystery thriller about crime solving through astrology – When Were You Born?

She doesn’t seem like the sort of person who would carry around a pet capuchin monkey named Venus but she does. And her fixation on horoscopes becomes her dominant personality trait, which helps to explain while Lee Ling didn’t inspire a popular sleuth franchise like Charlie Chan or The Saint. For one thing, she is always on the sidelines observing the investigation instead of being in the thick of it like Nick and Nora Charles.

A scene from the theatrical trailer for When Were You Born? (1938).

Luckily, Wong is surrounded by an energetic supporting cast and a wide array of colorful characters including two murderers, a forensic specialist (Maurice Cass) who loves his work a little too much, Corey’s lawyer (Olin Howland, the first victim of 1958’s The Blob) who offers his dubious services to Doris, and a blustery police sergeant (Frank Jacquet) who becomes Ling’s verbal sparring partner. In a typical exchange with the latter, Ling asks, “What day in March were you born, sergeant?” “The second,” he answers, suddenly startled, “How’d ya know I was born in March?” “From your feet for one thing,” she sarcastically responds.

A scene from the B-movie detective drama When Were You Born? (1938), starring Margaret Lindsay (center) and Anna May Wong.

James Stephenson, who is best known as the brilliant defense attorney for Bette Davis’s murderess in The Letter (1940), is the sort of callous, arrogant and unprincipled entrepreneur that probably deserves his fate in some ways and he makes the most of his juicy role. Margaret Lindsay provides the drama as the main suspect who can’t seem to tell the complete truth and Jeffrey Lynn dashes in and out of the movie briefly as a gung ho reporter. Lola Lane is also feisty and funny in her brief turn as one of Corey’s discarded girlfriends.

Lola Lane has a memorable supporting role in the crime drama, When Where You Born? (1938).

When Were You Born? is a genuine curiosity if nothing else. It’s just too bad the film, though diverting, doesn’t live up to the trailer which exploits the movie’s oddball potential with a series of scintillating come-ons. An earlier film from Warner Bros. entitled From Headquarters (1933), directed by William Dieterle, had also taken a behind-the-scenes look at police procedural with a focus on forensics (Margaret Lindsay starred in that film too!). But the astrology angle is a great hook and perhaps some contemporary filmmaker can come up with an astrologer detective heroine good enough to inspire a movie franchise.

When Were You Born? is not available on any format at this time but it could possibly end up as a DVD release from the folks at Warner Archive. In the meantime, you might want to check the Turner Classic Movies schedule to see if the film is going to air in the near future.

Leonard Mudie & Anna May Wong are being stalked by an armed assailant in When Were You Born? (1938), directed by William McGann.

* This is a revised and updated version of a post that originally appeared on Movie Morlocks, the official TCM blog which was renamed Streamline.

WHEN WERE YOU BORN, Charles Wilson, Margaret Lindsay, Anna May Wong, Lola Lane, 1938

Other website links of interest:

http://www.silentera.com/people/actresses/Wong-AnnaMay.html

http://www.pbs.org/program/anna-may-wong/

http://www.manlyphall.org/

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/04/19/mother-shipton/

There have been many outstanding and critically acclaimed documentaries on the subject of jazz and jazz musicians over the years from Aram Avakian & Bert Stern’s Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1959) to Bruce Weber’s Let’s Get Lost (1988) and Jean Bach’s A Great Day in Harlem (1994). But what is surprising is the fact that until recently no filmmaker has attempted to document the importance of Blue Note Records and its importance in the advancement of this uniquely American, home grown music. Suddenly, we have two documentaries on the subject, Eric Friedler’s It Must Schwing! The Blue Note Story (2018) and Sophie Huber’s Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes (2018), both of which are currently on the film festival circuit.

I have yet to see Huber’s documentary but Friedler’s It Must Schwing!, which recently premiered at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival, is a cause for celebration among jazz aficionados and essential viewing. The film is also a highly entertaining and accessible entry point for those who don’t know that much about the subject but are curious to learn more.

Francis Wolff (left) and Alfred Lion were the two jazz aficionados behind the record label Blue Note as featured in the 2018 documentary, It Must Schwing! The Blue Note Story.

Blue Note Records was a partnership between two German Jewish immigrants, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff. Lion launched the label in 1939 and was soon joined by Wolff, who was said to have taken the last boat out of Hamburg, Germany before the Nazis put an end to Jewish immigration. Together these two men transformed a record company into something visionary with their enormous passion, energy and talent for spotting and promoting the prime innovators of jazz. Their roster of artists looks like a Who’s Who of jazz music legends; Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Lee Morgan, Art Blakey and Dexter Gordon are just a few of the artists they recorded. Also, Lion and Wolff’s musical tastes reflect the exciting changes occurring in the jazz world from the beginnings of be bop to hard bop and the emergence of free jazz.

Jazz legend Miles Davis is captured in action by Blue Note photographer Francis Wolff as featured in the 2018 documentary It Must Schwing! The Blue Note Story. (Image from Getty Images)

Blue Note was primarily a two-man, low budget operation in the beginning but Lion and Wolff quickly established a reputation for being reputable businessmen who encouraged creativity in the studio and paid their musicians well (they even paid for rehearsal time, which was not a standard practice at most record companies at the time). The distinct, intimate Blue Note sound was perfected with the assistance of recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder and the album covers became iconic and highly collectible, thanks to graphic designer Reid Miles and the stunning black and white photography of Wolff, who hovered around the recording sessions, capturing candid images of the artists at work and play.

A famous image of jazz musician Wayne Shorter taken by Francis Wolff and featured in the 2018 documentary, It Must Schwing! The Blue Note Story.

Director Friedler, an Australian who has spend most of his career making documentaries for German television, takes a straightforward, chronological approach to It Must Schwing! but he does come up with a rather unconventional device for dealing with aspects of the Blue Note story which lacked any visual documentation. Instead of filling in gaps with photographs, letters, newspapers clippings or some similar form of narrative coverage, he uses animation. The often startling black and white animated sequences, created by Tetyana Chernyavska and Rainer Ludwig, will be a matter of taste for some viewers but I found the graphic novel/film noir style of these passages to be completely appropriate for depicting Lion and Wolff’s early years in Nazi Germany as well as their struggles to assimilate as immigrants in the unfamiliar streets of New York City. At the same time, the animated renderings of the Blue Note founders and various musicians are occasionally eerie, if not a little bit creepy.

Jazz musician Bennie Maupin recalls his days at Blue Note records in the 2018 documentary, It Must Schwing! by director Eric Friedler.

Still, the overall tone of It Must Schwing! is joyous and celebratory with a wealth of wonderful stories and anecdotes about the record label recalled by surviving jazz legends like Sonny Rollins, Ron Carter, Lou Donaldson, Herbie Hancock, Bennie Maupin, Wayne Shorter, Sheila Jordan (the only female singer on the label) and so many others. What becomes readily apparent is how Lion and Wolff, both survivors of religious persecution, completely empathized with the plight and treatment of African-Americans in the pre-Civil Rights era and how Blue Note became a voice for social and political change.

John Coltrane studies a music chart while photographer Francis Wolff looks on in the 2018 documentary, It Must Schwing! The Blue Note Story.

The ying-yang partnership of Lion and Wolff is also a fascinating study in contrasts and the perfect business marriage of an extrovert and an introvert. Lion was an enterprising, gregarious ladies-man while Wolff was the shy, intensely private artist in residence. Friedler’s documentary becomes particularly moving toward the end when Lion abruptly sells the company in 1965 to Liberty Records and soon retires while Wolff stays on with the new management but dies unexpectedly in 1971. At his funeral, Lion and fellow mourners were astonished to meet Wolff’s black girlfriend and her children; their existence was a complete surprise since Wolff never discussed his personal life.

Thelonious Monk at his piano as featured in the 2018 documentary It Must Schwing! The Blue Note Story.

In case you’re wondering about that title, schwing is how Lion, in his thick German accent, pronounced swing and whenever he listened to new compositions being recorded in the studio, he would push the musicians to go deeper or find the inner soul of the music if he felt something was lacking. “It must schwing!” he insisted.

Sheila Jordan is one of the surviving jazz legends interviewed for It Must Schwing! The Blue Note Story (2018).

No date has yet been announced for the theatrical release of It Must Schwing! The Blue Note Story. Atlantans still have one more chance to see the film. As part of the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival, it will be shown at the Sandy Springs Performing Arts Center on Wednesday, February 20 at 7:40 pm. You can find details at https://www.ajff.org/

Herbie Hancock shares his memories of Blue Note records in the 2018 documentary It Must Schwing! by director Eric Friedler.

Other website links of interest:

https://itmustschwing.com/en

http://www.playbill.com/article/it-must-schwing-the-blue-note-story-premieres-at-the-doc-nyc-festival

http://allinfo.space/2018/09/06/it-must-schwing-the-history-of-the-jazz-label-blue-note-records/

http://www.jazzwisemagazine.com/artists/13832-blue-note-the-story-of-the-greatest-label-in-jazz

https://londonjazzcollector.wordpress.com/record-labels-guide/labelography-2/blue-note-records-history/

http://jbspins.blogspot.com/2018/11/doc-nyc-18-it-must-schwingthe-blue-note.html

What do you do for an encore when your directorial film debut becomes a critical and commercial hit? That was the problem Paul Mazursky was facing in 1969 after Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice became the talk of the New York Film Festival where it was the opening night feature. His follow-up film, Alex in Wonderland (1970), expresses this dilemma but, if critics attacked the film for being an overt homage to Federico Fellini, Mazursky took the Italian maestro’s original concept and made it his own in an often absurdist portrait of Hollywood in the late sixties-early seventies and his own role in – and out – of it.

Paul Mazursky (left) played a delinquent in Blackboard Jungle (1955), co-starring Glenn Ford and Vic Morrow (seen on right).

Mazursky was by no means a novice in the film industry in 1969 and had begun his career as an actor (Stanley Kubrick’s Fear and Desire [1953], Blackboard Jungle [1955]) and moved into television screenwriting in the early sixties working on such series as The Rifleman, The Danny Kaye Show, and The Monkees. And when his first feature film screenplay, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! (1968), co-written with Larry Tucker, became a hit for its star, Peter Sellers, Mazursky was given the opportunity to direct a movie by producer Mike Frankovich.

According to Mazursky in his autobiography, Show Me the Magic, “Alex in Wonderland [1970] was a movie about a film director who had just come off a smash hit and didn’t know what to do next. It was precisely the position I was in after Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. The success of that had made Tucker and Mazursky the flavor of the month in Hollywood. But after several months of stops and starts, Larry and I had no follow-up project. We were both blocked. That’s when the idea came: Let’s do a movie about a blocked director. Not only is “Alex” blocked, but he dreams in the style of other directors, including the incomparable Federico Fellini. Of course, Fellini’s 8 1/2 [1963] was by now world famous as a movie about a blocked director.”

Paul Mazursky plays a narcissistic, self-deluded Hollywood producer in Alex in Wonderland (1970).

In today’s Hollywood, Mazursky would probably be urged by his producers to make a sequel to Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice but instead, Frankovich gave the green light to Mazursky and Tucker’s risky concept.

Donald Sutherland plays a Hollywood director suffering from creative blockage in Alex in Wonderland (1970).

The storyline follows Alex, a recent overnight sensation in Hollywood, through a period of inactivity and creative frustration. He is unable to commit to any studio projects and not fully engaged with his wife and family in day to day living either. His soul-searching is fueled by an active fantasy life in which he meets Fellini in Rome, leads an uprising of Black revolutionaries, stages a Mai Lai-like massacre on Sunset Boulevard and encounters his screen muse, Jeanne Moreau, at Larry Edmunds’ Bookshop.

Donald Sutherland plays a Hollywood director who meets screen muse Jeanne Moreau at the entrance to Larry Edmunds’ bookstore in L.A. in Alex in Wonderland (1970).

By the story’s end, Alex proves his commitment to his family by buying a new house and accepting his fate as a director who may only have one good movie in him. Yet, despite the allusions to Lewis Carroll’s famous novel, Mazursky weaves in plenty of behind-the-scenes satire and in-jokes for the astute film buff. For example, when Hal Stern, a manic producer played by Mazursky himself, pitches a Western to Alex, he tells him that Anthony Quinn would be perfect as the Native American hero. It might seem like an absurd idea except that Quinn did play a Native American protagonist that same year in Flap, a box office bomb for Warner Bros.

There is another Anthony Quinn connection to the movie that occurred off screen. During Mazursky’s discussion with Frankovich on the casting, the question of who would play Fellini arose. Although Anthony Quinn, a friend of Frankovich’s, was willing to play the famous Italian director, Mazursky and Tucker thought they should approach Fellini himself and soon found themselves on a plane to Rome to meet him.

Federico Fellini (center) makes a cameo appearance in this scene from Alex in Wonderland (1970), directed by Paul Mazursky.

Fellini had already indicated that he had no interest in appearing in Alex in Wonderland and proved elusive at first. Yet he eventually met with Tucker and Mazursky and after screening a print of Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and several days of socializing with the Americans in his favorite Italian restaurants, he agreed to a cameo appearance in the movie.

Donald Sutherland plays a hipster director who poses for a family photo with his daughers and wife (Ellen Burstyn) in Alex in Wonderland (1970).

The rest of the casting fell into place quickly. Donald Sutherland, who had become a much in-demand actor after his breakthrough role in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H* (1970), made an ideal Alex. “Ellen Burstyn played his wife,” Mazursky noted. “She found her inspiration from my wife, Betsy. I don’t think Betsy was thrilled with the idea of my making a “home movie” about our lives. My daughter Meg played one of Alex’s daughters. She was twelve, wore braces, and was very convincing. Viola Spolin, the mother of improvisational techniques in the American theater, played Alex’s mother, who was clearly based on my mother, Jean. (When my mother saw the completed film, she threatened to picket in front of the theatre in New York. “How could you show me like that?” she shouted on the telephone….The least you could have done was get Bette Davis to play me! Who the hell is this Viola Spolin?”).”

Jeanne Moreau (in foreground) appears in a surreal segment of Paul Mazursky’s Hollywood satire, Alex in Wonderland (1970).

Mazursky was also able to get Jeanne Moreau to play herself in a cameo where she sings a song set to the tune of George Delerue’s theme music from the Francois Truffaut film, Jules and Jim (1962); she wrote the lyrics herself.

A stylized homage to Federico Fellini appears in Paul Mazursky’s Alex in Wonderland (1970).

But when it came time to shoot Fellini’s cameo, the famous director had his assistant tell Mazursky that he was not available. In a panic, Mazursky hopped on a plane with Sutherland and a camera crew and flew to Rome. He basically ambushed Fellini at a restaurant but soon charmed the director into agreeing to appear in a short scene set in an editing room at Cinecitta where Fellini was editing his next feature, The Clowns (1970).

Donald Sutherland plays an alter ego of director Paul Mazursky in the Hollywood satire, Alex in Wonderland (1970).

Despite the movie’s numerous virtues including Laszlo Kovacs’ dreamlike cinematography and strong performances by Sutherland and Burstyn, Alex in Wonderland was not as well received as Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. “Alex in Wonderland had laid a colossal egg,” Mazursky said, “and I was reeling from this failure. I liked many things in the film and couldn’t understand the terrible hostility toward the picture. But that’s show business, folks.” It is true that the movie was a commercial failure but most critics were more mixed in their reactions than overwhelmingly negative.

Director Paul Mazursky (left) makes a hilarious cameo appearance opposite Donald Sutherland in Alex in Wonderland (1970).

In Pauline Kael’s review in The New Yorker, she pinpointed her main problem with Alex in Wonderland: “Alex’s fantasy life has no intensity – it’s a series of emotionally antiseptic reveries, staged like the big production numbers in a musical. And the film is so loose that one’s attention wanders…But Mazursky and his co-worker, Larry Tucker, have an affectionate, ambivalent way of observing the contradictions in how people live….The film has very funny moments, and at least one satiric triumph: a long revue skit in which Alex goes to lunch with a manic producer (played by Mazursky).”

Donald Sutherland plays a director trying to decide on his next film project in Paul Mazursky’s Alex in Wonderland (1970).

There were some critics though that championed the film such as Roger Ebert in The Chicago Sun-Times: “What makes it so good is the gift Mazursky, Tucker and their actors have of fleshing out the small scenes of human contact that give the movie its almost frightening resonance…beyond these intimate scenes, there are icily observant portraits of the “new Hollywood.” Of aimless “idealistic” arguments on the beach, of luncheon meetings, of idle people trying somehow to be idly committed. These scenes are the 1970 equivalent of Fitzgerald’s “The Last Tycoon” or Nathanael West’s “The Day of the Locust”: Unforgivingly accurate studies of the distance between America and the filmmakers who would be “relevant” about it. The Fellini elements are laid onto the film and don’t quite sink in (although buffs will enjoy them just as parody). But the human story does work, remarkably well, and if the movie doesn’t hold together we’re not disposed to hold that against it.”

Donald Sutherland prepares to enter a Hollywood studio where a current film project is a Goodbye, Mr. Chips remake in Alex in Wonderland (1970).

Seen today, Alex in Wonderland is a revealing and evocative time capsule of Hollywood and Los Angeles at the dawn of the ‘70s, a time when the old guard was dying out and the new rebel breed represented by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Bob Rafelson and others were taking over. Paul Mazursky was a part of this movement and this second film is both intriguing and frustrating for the way it experiments with conventional narrative techniques and audience expectations in what was essentially a mainstream commercial movie of its time.

Ellen Burstyn plays the patient but exasperated wife of Hollywood director Donald Sutherland in Alex in Wonderland (1970).

Donald Sutherland’s Alex may seem like a pretentious, immature narcissist but his behavior and that of his movie industry friends was typical of the young, privileged and mostly white movers and shakers of the new Hollywood.

Ellen Burstyn and Donald Sutherland in a rare domestic scene from Alex in Wonderland (1970).

And despite the film’s frequent flights of fantasy, Alex in Wonderland is grounded in reality by the numerous Los Angeles locations used throughout the movie; among these are Hollywood High, the MGM studio lot where the 1968 musical version of Goodbye, Mr. Chips is being promoted on huge banners, and Hollywood Boulevard, where we glimpse the Musso and Frank Grill, the Vogue Theater (it closed in 1995), the Supply Sergeant, Max Factor and other familiar landmarks.

The Vogue Theater (now closed) makes a cameo appearance in Alex in Wonderland (1970).

Alex in Wonderland was released by Warner Archive in 2011 as a no-frills DVD-R and that remains the only available option for viewing the film at this time.

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

Other websites of interest:

https://www.npr.org/2014/07/07/329517306/-fresh-air-remembers-screenwriter-paul-mazursky

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmmakersonfilm/10940120/Paul-Mazursky-Film-makers-on-film.html

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/sep/03/usa.film

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jul/02/paul-mazursky

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2016/08/08/ellen-burstyn-i-can-no-longer-make-a-living-from-movies/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7jHX6wOn7Y

Horror films based on Jewish folklore and Talmudic literature are not that commonplace but one of the early classics of silent cinema was based on a 16th century tale of a rabbi, Judah Low ben Bezulel, who brought a hulking clay figure to life to protect the Jewish community from anti-Semitic forces. German director/actor Paul Wegener was so taken with the legend that he made three films based on it, a 1915 version, which only exists in fragments, a 1917 parody entitled The Golem and the Dancing Girl (now considered a lost film) and the 1920 version, which is the most famous. There were other remakes in later years, including Julien Duvivier’s 1936 sound version, but a new variation on the menacing title creature from the Israeli filmmaking team of Doron Paz and his brother Yoav, takes a decidedly different approach to the famous legend, courtesy of Ariel Cohen’s screenplay.

The title monster from the 1920 version of The Golem is played by Paul Wegener, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Carl Boese.

The Paz Brother’s The Golem (2018) introduces several subplots and thematic concerns – maybe too many – in a film that defies easy categorization as a straightforward horror film. Religious persecution, family tragedy, martial discord, vigilante justice, the threat of a plague and black magic are all entwined in a narrative that also offers a portrait of an isolated rural community of Jewish settlers in 17th century Lithuania (It was filmed in the Ukraine).

Benjamin (Ishai Golan) and Hanna (Hani Furstenberg) try to resolve their troubled relationship in the period horror film, The Golem (2018), directed by the Paz brothers.

At the center of the story is Hanna played by Hani Furstenberg, who looks like an earthy hybrid of Liv Ullman and Jessica Chastain. Hanna is still in mourning for her dead son who died seven years earlier. Despite the attempts of her husband Benjamin (Ishai Golan) to impregnate her with another child, Hanna appears to be barren but it is really a deception. Secretly, Hanna has been using a birth control potion provided by the village herbalist.

Hani Furstenberg plays a grieving mother who unleases a supernatural entity to protect her community from invaders in The Golem (2018).

The situation has escalated tensions between the couple which is noticed by a seductive neighbor who openly flirts with Benjamin. The couple’s marriage is also threatened by the village’s patriarchal society and religious leadership which prevents women from worshipping in church with the men. Hanna revolts against this by spying on the rabbi and his followers from the church crawlspace and reading the Kaballah in the privacy of her home, none of which are condoned by her husband.

The leader of an anti-Semitic clan threatens to destroy a Jewish settlement unless they save his plague-ridden daughter in The Golem (2018).

When a group of ruthless plague survivors invade their community and threaten them with annihilation unless someone can save their leader’s infected daughter, Hanna takes action instead of resorting to prayer like the rabbi and his followers. Her dabbling in ancient rituals conjures up a supernatural protector, who at first is an indestructible weapon against their enemies, but then proves to be uncontrollable and deadly to all.

Hanna (Hani Furstenberg) conjures up an avenging demon from the earth in the 2018 horror drama, The Golem.

Most of this is a radical departure from earlier versions of The Golem and is what prevents it from being classified as a traditional horror film. The fact that the protagonist is a woman recovering from a personal tragedy is significant. In an interview with writer Danielle Nicole, the filmmakers stated, “We didn’t have a political intention, but more of a storytelling intention. We love dealing with female characters. It’s much more complicated for us and challenging to tell the story through the eyes of a woman and if it’s a woman running away from being a mother – well, that’s drama. We started working on the movie before the #MeToo movement so it wasn’t really in our heads, but we loved the idea of a woman fighting for her right to study Kaballah and to be treated like one of the men.”

An isolated Jewish settlement in 17th century Lithuania is the setting for The Golem (2018), an offbeat supernatural thriller.

Although The Golem opens with a prologue which pays homage to the original 1920 conception of the title creature, the demon which is conjured up by Hanna is a much more unconventional apparition. He first appears as a mute, mud-covered wild child.
After Hanna washes off the grime from his body, the golem is revealed to be a dead ringer for her departed son, which only increases her attachment to him.

Benjamin (Ishai Golan) attempts to subdue the demon his wife has conjured up through music in The Golem, directed by Doron and Yoav Paz.

The Golem is not completely flawless and horror fans may be disappointed in the Paz brothers’ preference for character development over non-stop action and explicit gore. Some of the supporting characters are little more than caricatures and the final third of the film is predictable and somewhat belabored except for a sequence featuring a failed exorcism attempt. There is even a final coda that sets up a possible sequel which seems like wishful thinking and is completely unnecessary.

A revenge-seeking invader threatens to exterminate an entire Jewish community in the supernatural fantasy film, The Golem (2018), directed by the Paz brothers.

Despite these minor complaints, The Golem is a handsomely mounted and atmospheric period piece and a welcome change of pace from the tired, formulaic pattern of torture-porn and found footage horror films a la Saw or The Blair Witch Project. Hani Furstenberg as Hanna is particularly impressive in a challenging role that could easily have become a very unsympathetic character. And the production design, art direction and costumes, especially those eerie bird-like plague masks, lend a convincing authenticity to the folk tale.

The filmmaking team of Doron (left) and Yoav Paz are the masterminds behind The Golem (2018), their third feature film.

The Golem is still playing at film festivals around the country. Atlantans can catch the final screening of it at the Regal Perimeter Pointe cinema on Saturday, February 23 at 8:35 pm as part of the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival. This is the third feature for The Paz brothers; their first film Phobidilia (2009) was a drama and their second Jeruzalem (2015) was a horror thriller. They are currently at work on Plan A, a thriller about a group of Jewish holocaust survivors circa 1945 who plot to poison the water system in Germany.

Other websites of interest:

Epic Pictures Unveils ‘The Golem’ As First Original Production For Dread Central Presents

https://epic-pictures.com/film/the-golem

https://horrorpedia.com/2018/08/21/the-golem-reviews-movie-film-horror-israeli-2018-overview-cast-plot/

http://www.nightmarishconjurings.com/2018/11/05/interview-doron-yoav-paz-for-the-golem/

http://horrorfuel.com/2018/11/05/yoav-paz-talks-jeruzalem-2-the-golem-and-more-in-our-interview/

https://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/feature/2018-10-31-interview-with-doron-paz-about-the-golem-feature-story-by-jennie-kermode

It sounds like someone’s LSD flashback. Frank Zappa, boxer Sonny Liston, Annette Funicello, female impersonator T.C. Jones, San Francisco’s legendary topless dancer Carol Doda and other cult celebrities appear in a movie co-scripted by Jack Nicholson and directed by Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces, 1970) that showcases the TV-created pop band The Monkees in the leading roles, who in one scene play dandruff in Victor Mature’s hair. Entitled Head (1968), this Cuisinart-puree of pop culture infused with anti-establishment posturing and served up in the then-current style of a trippy experimental film could only have happened in the late sixties when Hollywood studios were in a try-anything phase to capture the rapidly receding youth market.

The Monkees get to play dandruff in Victor Mature’s hair in Head (1968), directed by Bob Rafelson.

Virtually plotless with a free-form structure that owed a lot to the scattershot sketch format of TV’s “Laugh-In” (1968-1973), Head was like the anti-A Hard Day’s Night (1964) for cynical hipsters. Rampant use of recreational drugs among Hollywood’s elite and film industry personnel might have had something to do with it too.

The Monkees reveal the puppeteers behind their strings in the psychedelic fantasy satire Head (1968).

Instead of depicting David, Micky, Michael and Peter as the endearing goofballs worshipped by teenyboppers across America, it deconstructed their image, revealing them to be a synthetic by-product of Hollywood marketing. The irony was that The Monkees were in on the joke and were only too happy to spoof their once popular TV series (1966-1968) and pre-packaged personalities.

screenwriter Jack Nicholson and director Bob Rafelson off camera on the set of Head (1968).

Head also marked Bob Rafelson’s feature film debut after an apprenticeship of producing and directing episodes of The Monkees TV series. And it was clearly a transitional film for Jack Nicholson who already had penned several screenplays including The Trip (1967) and was on the verge of stardom without knowing it – Easy Rider (1969), released the following year, would catapult the actor to overnight success.

Initially called Untitled, Head was an unconventional project from the beginning. According to author Patrick McGilligan in Jack’s Life: A Biography of Jack Nicholson, “Bob, Bert [Schneider, executive producer], and Jack, with the four Monkees in tow, went to Ojai [California] for several days. They smoked “a ton of dope” (as Davy Jones recalls) and tossed ideas into a running tape recorder…The script was set up to have the least continuity imaginable, and only the slenderest plot trigger – the four Monkees leaping off the Golden Gate Bridge in an effort to escape the mental prison of a black box, which was “Head,” meaning pothead, but also meaning all the rules and straitlaced conventions inside one’s head that inhibit enjoyment of life.

A surreal sequence in Head (1968) where Davy Jones battles world heavyweight boxing champion Sonny Liston.

“Everybody agreed that the movie should be anti-Monkees,” according to Patrick McGilligan in Jack’s Life: A Biography of Jack Nicholson. “This creation of Bob and Bert’s had become a Frankenstein monster running amok through their lives. Untitled (as the Monkees film was initially called, as if it were a piece of abstract art destined for museum walls) would expose the very process that had created the Monkees, the hollow, star-making machinery of Hollywood.”

The Monkees (from left to right) Peter Tork, Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones and Michael Nesmith in their first and last feature film, Head (1968).

“The weekend trip did not go without incident,” Micky Dolenz recalled in his autobiography with Mark Bego. “When the time came to discuss writing credit, we were informed that only Jack and Bob would be given credit. We were disappointed and angry. Mike was furious. He took all the tapes and locked them in the trunk of his car! After a few days of “negotiations” the tapes were returned, but we didn’t get any credit!”

One of the overlooked films of 1968, Head is a genuine cult oddity today.

Nicholson and Rafelson then went away to the desert for inspiration with their tapes and notes. “Jack and Bob fired up some joints, dropped acid, took a walk on the beach, and came up with the novel idea of deconstructing the Monkees in a melange of music, Vietnam footage, and kitschy pop culture artifacts.” (from Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind).

Jack Nicholson, Davy Jones and Bob Rafelson are seen during the making of Head (1968), the Monkees’ first and last feature film.

Toby Rafelson, the ex-wife of the director, said “I think that repudiating the very thing the Monkees stood for, using them in order to do this, which he didn’t mind doing, shows you what his colors were, which was that his own image of himself was more important than the product…I think the need to feel cool, in the minds of guys like Bob and Bert, was terribly, terribly important.” (from Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind).

Former Walt Disney and Beach Party actress Annette Funicello gives fake tears added for a scene in Head (1968), The Monkees’ film debut.

By the time filming began on Head, The Monkees were less than happy with their circumstances. Not only were they feuding with Columbia over their contracts and salaries but they felt betrayed by Rafelson and Nicholson after they were informed that none of them would receive a writing credit on the film.

The Monkees star in their first and only feature film, Head (1968), directed by Bob Rafelson and written by Jack Nicholson & Rafelson & The Monkees (uncredited).

Dolenz later wrote in his autobiography, “Right from the beginning of the television series, there had been a dispute over our salaries…It was Mike, naturally, who took the lead and introduced us to Jerry Perenchio – a very powerful agent in Hollywood at the time. Jerry took us on and promised he would cut us a very lucrative deal. The only problem was that we would have to stick to our guns, make a stand, even strike if it became necessary. It did. I don’t remember what we were asking for, it couldn’t have been much; yet Bob and Bert wouldn’t give in. We didn’t have many choices open to us: either hold firm or cave in. And to make matters worse, Peter had decided that he was not going to join us. Peter! The antiestablishment, anticapitalistic antianti. Here we were, the workers, lined up at the barricades, ready to take on the opulent potentates, and Peter sided with the parsimonious PTB! He was a scab!…The first day of shooting came along and there was only one Monkee on the set: Peter…..But by the next day we were all back. The deal had been done, the negotiations finalized. Unfortunately, even after all the millions that Bob and Bert had made off of the Monkees, I don’t think they ever forgave us for standing up to them that one time.”

Bob Rafelson directs Michael Nesmith in a scene from the musical fantasy/satire Head (1968)

Rafelson even began to play records on the set by other rock groups such as The Electric Flag, just to antagonize the Monkees.

When Head was completed, Rafelson and Nicholson launched a guerilla advertising campaign in New York City, plastering stickers for the film everywhere on taxicabs, signs, police helmets, you name it. At one point they were even arrested for being public nuisances but their efforts were in vain.

A typical fantasy sequence from the Monkees’ film debut by director Bob Rafelson circa 1968.

The critics were unimpressed and the film held little appeal for anyone who wasn’t a fan of the Monkees’ TV show. Dolenz stated later, “Because the film was rated R, most of our fans couldn’t even get into the theatre to see it in the first place and those who did just didn’t have any idea of what we were up to.” Nicholson, however, maintains even today that Head is one of his proudest accomplishments and still calls it “the best rock-‘n-roll movie ever made.” Despite its commercial failure, Rafelson was equally pleased with it, comparing it often to Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963).

Micky Dolenz attacks a Coca-Cola machine in the middle of the desert in the absurbist musical comedy Head (1968).

The remarkable thing about Head is how well it holds up today despite being mired in the counterculture of the sixties. Some of the satirical jabs and anti-war rhetoric are as timely as ever, particularly the scene where Micky attacks a defective coke machine in the middle of an Arabian desert set. Or the scene where a deranged football player (Green Bay Packers’ middle linebacker Ray Nitschke) repeatedly tackles Peter in a foxhole while chanting, “We’re number one, we’re number one!”

Micky Dolenz & Teri Garr star in a memorable sequence from the Monkees’ debut film, Head (1968), directed by Bob Rafelson.

My favorite moments in the film feature unexpected cameo appearances from celebrities who have no real connection to the Monkees like 1940s beefcake actor Victor Mature who probably had no awareness of the Monkees until he was cast in the film but he seems amused by the shenanigans….

Victor Mature is one of the unexpected guest stars in Head (1968), starring The Monkees.

Or world heavyweight boxing champ Sonny Liston (his boxing scenes with Davy Jones are a distinct WTF moment and particularly brutal for fans of the diminutive singer).

Davy Jones is beaten and bloody from his bout with Sonny Liston in Head (1968).

Annette Funicello, who became famous as an actress in Walt Disney productions and later in the AIP Beach Party movies, also pops up as a fantasy love interest for Jones.

And then there’s the weirdest of all cult actors – Timothy Carey (The World’s Greatest Sinner, Poor White Trash aka Bayou), who seems to get bigger, scarier and more incomprehensible with each recurring appearance. (If you’re a Carey fan and haven’t seen this, you are missing one of his prime showcases).

Timothy Carey plays a badass who enjoys terrorizing the Monkees in Head (1968).

Rafelson and Nicholson also have fun spoofing different movie genres and in one Western burlesque Teri Garr gets to deliver the immortal line “Suck it, before the venom reaches my heart!” after being bitten by a rattlesnake. The film’s uneasy mixture of comedic throwaway bits with actual newsreel footage of Viet Nam and other flash points of the sixties gives it a subversive edge though some critics found it pretentious.

“There was this one very disturbing sequence,” Dolenz recalled, “in which Bob used that famous piece of news footage of Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan pulling out a snub-nosed .38 and shooting Vietcong Captain Bay Lop in the head….At one point in the movie it is shown thirty-two times simultaneously in split screen.”

The Monkees (from left to right) – Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork – star in their first and only feature film, Head (1969).

In the end, The Monkees may have had the last laugh since they were finally able to play their own music in Head after being dubbed by studio musicians in their television show (The band members, with the exception of Michael Nesmith, weren’t real musicians when they were first hired for the TV series but learned how to play by the time Head went into production).

Michael Nesmith performing in the Monkees’ first and last feature film, Head (1968).

And Head includes some of their best songs such as Nesmith’s all-out-rocker “Circle Sky” (recorded before a live audience in Utah), Tork’s two “Summer of Love” ditties, “Can You Dig It” and “Long Title: Do I Have To Do This All Over Again,” “As We Go Along,” a Carole King-Toni Stern composition featuring the guitar work of Ry Cooder and Neil Young, plus “Daddy’s Song” by Harry Nilsson and the psychedelic opening number, “Porpoise Song,” written by Jerry Coffin and Carole King.

A typical example of the psychedelic style of Bob Rafelson’s Head (1968) starring The Monkees.

Years after being ridiculed as an infantile imitation of The Beatle manufactured for fickle teenagers, The Monkees are finally getting a little overdue respect for Head whose cult continues to grow whenever it is shown. And Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson have nothing to be ashamed of either.

Jack Nicholson and director Bob Rafelson (left) on the head of Head (1968), starring The Monkees.

Rhino Video released a DVD edition of Head in 1998 but Monkees fans will want to go with the blu-ray or DVD version from The Criterion Collection. The only catch is the film is part of the America Lost and Found: The BBS Story boxed set and is not sold separately. But if you buy that, you also get the other landmark and offbeat BBS films – Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show, The King of Marvin Gardens, A Safe Place and Drive, He Said. The Head disc includes an audio commentary by The Monkees, screen tests and a rare 1968 TV interview with The Monkees and a lot more.

The Criterion Collection DVD/Blu-Ray of Head (1968)

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

And now for some additional Head trivia:

The underwater mermaid sequences were filmed in the Bahamas.

Other locations used in Head included Bronson Canyon in Griffith Park, the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, the Valley Auditorium in Salt Lake City, the Gerald Desmond Bridge in Long Beach and the Screen Gems Studios in Wilmington, North Carolina.

The Monkees’ beach house, which was regularly seen on their TV series, was also used in the film but with some new additions such as an elevator cage and an aquarium.

Davy Jones gets a solo number in the tripped out musical satire, Head (1968).

At the time of filming, Davy Jones was secretly married to Linda Haines but she can be glimpsed briefly in a party scene during the song “Long Title: Do I Have To Do This All Over Again.”

Even though he admitted the screenplay was total nonsense, actor Victor Mature reputedly agreed to do the film saying, “All I know is it makes me laugh.”

Victor Mature makes a bizarre cameo appearance in Head (1968), the Monkees’ film debut.

Teri Garr was cast in the film because she was a friend of Jack Nicholson. They had taken an acting class together from Eric Morris and some of their classmates were Harry Dean Stanton, Maggie Blye and singer/dancer Toni Basil.

The Monkees rehearse a song while co-screenwriter Jack Nicholson observes during the making of Head (1968).

Helena Kallianiotes, who plays the lesbian hitchhiker Palm Apodaca in Five Easy Pieces (1970), appears as a belly dancer in the “Can You Dig It” musical number.

Director Bob Rafelson worked in New York City as a writer on various television shows before moving to Los Angeles to work on The Monkees as a writer and director. He shared producer duties with Bert Schneider who would later produce Easy Rider (1969) and Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces (1970).

Rafelson, writer/co-producer Jack Nicholson, and Dennis Hopper make cameo appearances in the Columbia-Screen Gems Studio cafe segment of Head.

Davy Jones appears with Frank Zappa in Bob Rafelson’s Head (1968).

Toward the end of The Monkees’ TV series, rock ‘n roll musicians Frank Zappa and Tim Buckley, father of Jeff, made appearances on the show.

Head includes film clips from Gilda (1946), Golden Boy (1939), City for Conquest (1940), The Black Cat (1934), and newsreel footage from the Viet Nam war.

The Coca-Cola company took offense at the scene in which Micky beats up a coke machine in the desert and tried to get an injunction against the movie. They weren’t successful.

The Coca-Cola machine scene is often excised from TV showings of Head.

Some of the Vietnam war footage that was used in Head was also featured in producer Bert Schneider’s 1974 documentary, Hearts and Minds, directed by Peter Davis. It won the Oscar for the Best Documentary that year.

Carol Doda, who appears in a cameo as Sally Silicon in Head, was a stripper who worked at the Condor Club in San Francisco and expanded her breast size from 34B to 44D through silicon injections.

Michael Nesmith and famous stripper Carol Doda appear in a scene from Head (1968), directed by Bob Rafelson.

T.C. Jones (aka Thomas Craig Jones) was a cross-dresser and eccentric character actor who made memorable appearances in the Jayne Mansfield comedy, Promises! Promises! (1963), the psycho thriller The Name of the Game Is Kill (1968) and such TV series as The Wild, Wild West and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (the creepy “An Open Window” episode). He plays Mr. AND Mrs. Ace in Head.

Female impersonator T.C. Jones makes a cameo appearance in Head (1968).

The tagline for Head was “What is HEAD all about? Only John Brockman’s shrink knows for sure!” [John Brockman was the mastermind behind the film’s promotional campaign].

The unconventional John Brockman ad for Head (1968)

The first cut of Head ran almost two hours but after a disastrous sneak preview in Los Angeles it was edited down to a length of eighty-six minutes.

Peter Tork can be heard whistling the chorus to the Beatles song, “Strawberry Fields Forever” in one scene where he enters a bathroom.

Peter Tork (center) in a typically weird scene from Head (1968), the Monkees’ debut film.

Shortly after the completion of Head, Jack Nicholson was cast by Vincente Minnelli in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970) on the basis of his performance in Psych-Out (1968).

According to Micky Dolenz, Frank Zappa once asked him to be the drummer for his band, the Mothers of Invention.

Micky Dolenz described Head in his autobiography as “action, thrills, adventure, sex, horror, slapstick, beautiful scenery, and state-of-the-art visual effects, including, to my knowledge, the first use of “solarization” (that saturated negative colorizing hippie trippie photographic technique). This film was a hippie’s wet dream. Kind of like Hellzapoppin meets Peter Max.”

Micky Dolenz in a fantasy segment from the freewheeling pop culture satire, Head (1968).

The composer and conductor of the incidental music cues in Head was Ken Thorne who served as the musical director on Help! (1965), the Beatles’ second film.

Percy Helton, who appears as the Heraldic Messenger in Head, was a prolific character actor who appears in countless films and TV shows such as The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres and Bonanza. His film credits include Kiss Me Deadly (1955), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and Miracle on 34th Street (1947) as a drunken Santa Claus.

Head choreographer Toni Basil had a top forty hit in 1982 with the song “Mickey.” You can see her briefly in the “Daddy’s Song” musical number in the Monkees’ film.

Other websites of interest:

https://www.monkeeslivealmanac.com/blog/category/jack%20nicholson

https://variety.com/2018/music/news/monkees-head-50th-anniversary-screening-1203018711/

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/apr/28/monkees-head-jack-nicholson-interview

http://nightflight.com/the-monkeess-head-the-most-extraordinary-adventure-western-comedy-love-story-mystery-drama-musical-documentary-satire-ever-made/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7IBVhqDMoo

Eva Renzi makes her screen debut as an international model in Playgirl (1966), directed by Will Tremper.

A new kind of female protagonist emerged in the sixties who was free-spirited, independent, hedonistic and willing to exploit her beauty and charm for social advancement without being categorized as a typical prostitute. Audrey Hepburn certainly set the standard as the unconventional Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) but other famous examples include Julie Christie’s self-absorbed model in Darling (1965) and Genevieve Waite’s wide-eyed waif in Joanna (1968). Lesser known but a distinctly German variation on this prototype is 1966’s Playgirl (also known as That Woman in the U.S.) featuring Eva Renzi in her feature film debut.

The English language poster for Playgirl (1966) was retitled That Woman and hyped as a racy Eurotrash film but it is really closer to a New Wave art film.

Directed by Will Tremper, Playgirl is the story of Alexandra Borowski, a globe-trotting model who simultaneously juggles two or more affairs, unable to decide what it is she really wants. On the surface, the film is as superficial, animated and seductive as Alexandra but look closer and you might see a subtle critique of a younger generation (as represented by Renzi) who grew up in post-WWII Germany in the rubble of Berlin and other bombed-out cities.

Eva Renzi searches for love and her own self-identity in the city where she was born – Berlin – but never knew in Playgirl (1966).

The Berlin of Tremper’s film, however, is not the war-torn ruin glimpsed in such films as Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair (1948) and Robert Aldrich’s Ten Seconds to Hell (1959). Instead, it’s a flourishing tourist attraction with a new skyline, a jet-set nightlife and boulevards teeming with Fiats, Porsches and Mercedes-Benzs. In some ways, Playgirl is a valentine to Berlin, a picture postcard time capsule of how the city looked in 1966 but the haunted past is lurking around every corner.

International model Alexandra (Eva Renzi) starts an affair with Bert (Harald Leipnitz), a businessman’s assistant, in Playgirl (1966).

The ghosts are even conjured up occasionally as when Alexandra visits the Olympia Stadium for a swim and Bert Lahner (Harald Leipnitz), one of her current infatuations, casually mentions that it was the site of the 1936 Olympic trials where Jesse Owens won four gold medals, defeating his German competitors under Hitler’s baleful gaze. Alexandra has little awareness of that but her curiosity about the city’s past and the war is clearly an attempt to re-connect with where she was born (her family moved when she was small and she’s been on-the-go every since).

Alexandra (Eva Renzi) ponders her future as she approaches the city of Berlin in Playgirl (1966, aka That Woman).

When Playgirl opens, Alexandra is shown sleeping in the passenger seat of a car while her current lover, a Hungarian businessman, speeds through the countryside toward Berlin. Once in the city, she quickly abandons the Hungarian when she sees the second rate hotel he has arranged for her and charms his assistant (Hans-Joachim Ketzlin), whom she nicknames 007, into taking her to another address. The 007 reference is never really explained since Ketzlin looks more like a Bond villain in the style of Robert Shaw’s Soviet assassin in From Russia With Love. One character even refers to him as looking like German actor Peter Van Eyck, which is closer on the mark, but his function in Playgirl is to provide a contrast to the type of men Alexandra pursues. Ketzlin recognizes “class” when she sees it and is only too happy to assist the model, who is clearly unobtainable to someone of his low rank in the social/economic hierarchy.

Alexandra (Eva Renzi) charms chauffeur Hans-Joachim Ketzlin into carrying her bags in Playgirl (1966).

Alexandra quickly makes her way to the offices of real estate developer Joachim Steigenwald (Paul Hubschmid). Joachim previously enjoyed a fling with Alexandra in Rome but is now annoyed by her unannounced appearance and sends his assistant Bert (Leipnitz) to entertain her and hopefully send her on her way. But Alexandra is not that easily put off and soon seduces Bert away from his fiancée (Elga Stass) while reigniting a tempestuous affair with Joachim.

Real estate developer Joachim (Paul Hubschmid) tries to fit Alexandra (Eva Renzi) into his busy schedule in Will Tremper’s Playgirl (1966).

That is the basic storyline of Playgirl but Tremper doesn’t really treat it as melodrama or romantic comedy; he approaches it as if he is making a fictitious documentary on this new breed of German who lives for the present and her own pleasure. Clearly Tremper was influenced by the French New Wave in regards to the film’s free-wheeling narrative which is shot on location in the streets and sidewalks of Berlin with no need for studio sets or artificial interiors. The film’s pop-jazz score by the great Peter Thomas (who composed the score for numerous German krimi thrillers like Secret of the Red Orchid) adds a pulsating, urban feel to the ambiance and helps propel Alexandra from one telling vignette to the next.

Alexandra (Eva Renzi) is directed by photographer Timo (Umberto Orsini, foreground) for a fashion shoot in Berlin in Playgirl (1966).

One of the more visually enticing sequences involve Alexandra’s impromptu modeling for photographer Timo (Umberto Orsini), who hires her on the spot when a model becomes unavailable for a shoot. Their work together, which also includes an unavoidable mutual attraction, allows Renzi to put on quite a fashion show in various dresses, wigs and poses against such iconic backgrounds as the Berlin Wall. This segment of the film is highly reminiscent of the scenes in John Schlesinger’s Darling where Julie Christie’s gifts as a malleable photographic object are perfectly realized by gay photographer Roland Curram.

Eva Renzi constantly changes her appearance and wardrobe in Playgirl (1966), a German New Wave film about an international model.

How you respond to Alexandra is going to differ from viewer to viewer. Tremper presents his heroine without any overt editorializing, allowing her behavior to speak for itself. Is she a manipulative flirt with an agenda or emotionally unstable? Or is she genuinely naïve and high-spirited with a knack for attracting rich, powerful older men?

Alexandra (Eva Renzi) confronts her dinner date (Paul Hubschmid) with her questions about Berlin’s Nazi past in Playgirl (1966).

She might be a composite of all those traits coupled with a directness and unpredictability that both attracts and confuses her male admirers. When she’s with Joachim, she asks him to show her monuments or statues dedicated to “this Hitler” she has heard so much about. He can’t tell if she’s being a provocateur or a clueless airhead but he is obviously resistant to discussing the past with her.

Bert (Harald Leipnitz) and Alexandra (Eva Renzi) share an emotional moment in Playgirl (aka That Woman, 1966).

Alexandra is equally a challenge for Bert, baiting him with questions about racial prejudice. Although he confesses that he doesn’t like black people (using the odious N word), Alexandra’s attempts to appear more enlightened are completely discounted by her same derogatory term for the race as if it were the only word to describe them. Was there not a less insulting, more acceptable title at the time for black Germans like Afrodeutsche (Afro-German)? At any rate, Alexandra’s two romantic rivals agree she is a handful but for Bert she’s enthralling and for Joachim she’s a “tender schizophrenic.”

In scenes such as the above, Playgirl suggests that it is not just a contemporary portrait of Berlin’s current “It Girl” but a depiction of the city and its social mores during the “economic miracle” of the late ‘50s-early 60s. Even though Tremper presents it as a stylish, fast-moving entertainment, the post-WWII years of Germany would soon become fertile thematic ground for more penetrating, art house fare from a new wave of native filmmakers like Alexander Kluge (Yesterday Girl), Werner Rainer Fassbinder (The Marriage of Maria Braun), Helma Sanders-Brahms (Germany Pale Mother), Wim Wenders (Alice in the Cities) and others.

George Kennedy (left), Eva Renzi and James Garner star in Delbert Mann’s action-adventure, The Pink Jungle (1968).

As the star of Playgirl, German born Eva Renzi makes an impressive film debut that showcases her chameleon-like beauty and natural screen presence. It should have led to bigger and better roles but after a brief flurry of films, including Funeral in Berlin (1966) opposite Michael Caine and The Pink Jungle (1968) with James Garner, she never attained international stardom and concentrated mainly on German films and television. American viewers probably known her best for her disturbing performance in Dario Argento’s signature giallo, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970).

Tony Musante is pinned under a toppled sculpture while Eva Renzi toys with a very sharp knife in Dario Argento’s thriller, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970).

I was not able to find much information on Renzi (she died at age 60 in 2004) other than some minor biographical data that said she was unhappy with her film industry experiences and was considered difficult by some directors. One interesting bit of trivia is the fact that she married her screen co-star from Playgirl – Paul Hubschmid – the year after they made that film. They divorced in 1980.

Swiss musician and big band leader Paul Kuhn is featured in Will Tremper’s valentine to Berlin, Playgirl (1966).

The rest of the cast of Playgirl is a mix of well-known German actors with high profile Berlin celebrities in cameo or tiny bit parts like hotelier Heinze Zellermayer, fashion designer Heinz Oestergaard, Swiss musician Paul Kuhn and artist Reinhold Timm. IMDB even lists Hollywood director Nicholas Ray among the cast members although his scenes were later deleted.

Director Will Tremper (left) discusses a scene with Harald Leipnitz and Elga Stass on the set of Playgirl (1966).

Playgirl didn’t make much of an impact with German film critics or moviegoers when it first appeared and Tremper would only direct one more film, 1970’s The Naughty Cheerleader (Mir hat e simmer Spab gemacht), a soft core sex comedy starring Barbi Benton (Hugh Hefner’s girlfriend at the time) and guest appearances by Hefner, Broderick Crawford, Lionel Stander, Klaus Kinski and others.

It wasn’t a very glorious end to a writing/directing career that began in the mid-fifties and found success almost immediately with his screenplay for Die Halbstarken (1956), a hard-hitting social drama about juvenile delinquency, which was like Germany’s answer to Rebel Without a Cause (1955). The film was a smash hit (it was released in the U.S. in an English dubbed version entitled Teenage Wolfpack) and helped make Horst Buchholz a star.

Tremper’s directorial debut Flight from Berlin (Flucht nach Berlin, 1961) was a highly successful and topical Cold War thriller inspired by an article in Stern magazine. The film won awards for Christian Doermer’s performance and the film score by Peter Thomas. His follow-up film, The Endless Night (Die endlose Nacht, 1963), is generally considered his finest film and won numerous awards including Best Film from the German Film Critics Association. The entire movie unfolds at the Berlin-Tempelhof airport where passengers are stranded after a thick fog has caused the cancellation of all flights. Made the same year as another airport terminal drama, The V.I.P.s, which featured an all-star cast headed by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, The Endless Night is not a lavish, Metrocolor soap opera like the latter film but a much more somber and complex drama with multiple characters and highlighted by the luminous black and white cinematography of Hans Jura (The Lickerish Quartet).

Unfortunately, Tremper’s subsequent work was overlooked and today he is almost forgotten while his contemporaries like Rolf Thiele (Rosemary, Tonio Kroger), Berhard Wicki (The Bridge), Kurt Hoffman (Confessions of Felix Krull) and Robert Siodmak (The Rats, The Devil Strikes at Night) are usually singled out as the most important German directors during the post-war years of the fifties.

Eva Renzi makes a stunning film debut in Will Tremper’s Playgirl (aka That Woman, 1966).

Playgirl is currently unavailable on any format in the U.S. but the good news is that UCM.ONE, a Berlin-based distributor, has restored the film and it is available for theatrical distribution in Europe. That means there is a chance that it might end up being programmed by some film archive in the U.S. like the Film Society of Lincoln Center. If this were to happen, it might help revive interest in the films of Will Tremper, who certainly deserves to be better known, if only for Flight from Berlin, The Endless Night and Playgirl.

Alexandra (Eva Renzi, right) brazenly flirts with Bert (Harald Leipnitz) in front of his displeased girlfriend Hildchen (Elga Stass) in Playgirl (1966).

Other website links of interest:

http://sensesofcinema.com/2006/great-directors/lewis_joseph/

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-H-Lewis

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2000/sep/12/guardianobituaries.filmnews

https://www.popmatters.com/145728-the-halliday-brand-2495976341.html

https://livius1.wordpress.com/2018/09/02/the-halliday-brand/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2OX4DPBBpE

Timothy Carey (on throne) plays a self-proclaimed messiah who starts his own political party in the underground satire, The World’s Greatest Sinner (1962).

You might not know the name but you know the face. One of the most eccentric character actors in American cinema, he has had the rare distinction of working with everyone from James Dean and Elia Kazan (East of Eden) to Marlon Brando (The Wild One; One-Eyed Jacks) to Stanley Kubrick (The Killing; Paths of Glory) to John Cassavetes (Minnie and Moskowitz; The Killing of a Chinese Bookie) to The Monkees (their feature debut Head) to Mr. T, Bill Maher and Gary Busey in D.C. Cab. Let me add a few more to that already impressive filmography which includes appearing with Clark Gable (Across the Wide Missouri), Francis the Talking Mule (Francis in the Navy) and Shelley Winters and Debbie Reynolds (What’s the Matter With Helen?) and god knows who else. We’re talking about Timothy Carey and probably his greatest role is the one you’ve never seen – The World’s Greatest Sinner (1962).

Written, directed and starring Timothy Carey, The World’s Greatest Sinner truly qualifies as an underground movie in more ways than one. Not only did it never receive an official theatrical release, making it practically impossible to see unless it was at one-off screenings organized by Carey, but the film defies practically every convention of commercial filmmaking, inventing its own film language as it goes along. Is it a Dadaist prank? (Carey was a huge fan of Salvador Dali). Is it an allegory about American culture and society? Is it a Beat Generation rejection of conformity? Or is it some kind of crackpot masterpiece about self-actualization? It’s probably all of the above and then some.

Timothy Carey plays a man who could be crackpot or a genuine visionary in The World’s Greatest Sinner (1962).

Here’s a capsule version of The World’s Greatest Sinner. An insurance agent named Clarence Hilliard suddenly has a revelation at work and discards his nine-to-five existence for streetcorner sermonizing. But he doesn’t preach the gospel. Instead he espouses his own spiritual beliefs after making a pact with the Devil (the voice of Paul Frees in the guise of a snake) – “There’s only one God, and that’s Man.” Soon, he changes his name to God and begins to attract a following of new converts through his live rockabilly performances and impassioned rabble-rousing.

Clarence Hilliard (Timothy Carey) rocks out with his band as he campaigns for President of the U.S. in The World’s Greatest Sinner (1962).

His promise to make everyone a “superhuman being” brings him into the political arena where he runs as an independent for President of the United States. As his power and influence grows, so does his delusion that he is invincible. He seduces 80-year-old women and 14-year-old girls alike in his blatant flaunting of taboos, incites riots, and eventually challenges the real God to a showdown.

As audacious as it sounds, the execution is decidedly un-Hollywood in presentation. The film, featuring a cast of non-professional actors with few exceptions, has a home movie feel to it, with scenes shot in Carey’s home, his neighborhood, in and around Los Angeles and on cheap interior, low-budget sets.

The sound recording is inferior and some of the dialogue is hard to hear, the cinematography (by Ray Dennis Steckler, director of 1964’s The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies) is wildly uneven from poorly lit scenes to an obvious fondness for the odd detail. And the editing is haphazard, resulting in occasional incoherence that is closer to stream-of-consciousness musings than a conventional linear approach to narrative.

A very young Frank Zappa (left) and Timothy Carey appear together circa the early 1960s.

The musical segments, in particular, are especially memorable because Carey recruited a young, unknown-at-the-time Frank Zappa to compose the score – and it’s one reason for the movie’s cult fame. Zappa would later dismiss the movie, according to Carey, stating that The World’s Greatest Sinner was “the world’s worst film and all the actors were from skid row.” Those same accusations would later be leveled at the films of John Waters (Pink Flamingos, Multiple Maniacs) which shares so many sensibilities and renegade filmmaking tactics with Carey’s opus.

An insurance salesman has a revelation and starts his own political party in the absurdist comedy, The World’s Greatest Sinner (1962), written by, directed and starring Timothy Carey (pictured).

Of course, the main reason to see The World’s Greatest Sinner is to observe Timothy Carey with the brakes removed. He’s mesmerizing in every scene but subtlety is not his speciality. Some critics have accused him of being a total ham and his scene-chewing has an excessive, bigger-than-life quality. But just try to tear your eyes away from the screen.

Self-proclaimed visionary Clarence Hilliard (Timothy Carey with guitar) prepares to wow his audience and increase his fan base in The World’s Greatest Sinner (1962).

Watch him shake like a bowl of radioactive jello as his Elvis-like alter ego dressed in gold lamé (There’s a little James Brown thrown in as well – “Please! Please! Please! Please! Please! Take My Hand!” – and maybe even some Tiny Tim). See him transform before your eyes into a hell and brimstone evangelist or play it sweet and low-key as an insurance salesman who’s just “seen the light.”

Private Maurice Ferol (Timothy Carey) is condemned to death by firing squad in Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957).

Carey has always had his own “style” of acting and when you start to consider all of the parts he’s played, he stands out in every movie, even in films where a director like Stanley Kubrick tightly controls every detail right down to an actor’s performance. Among some of my favorite Carey performances are his scary whorehouse bouncer in East of Eden, the shell-shocked, emotionally damaged soldier facing execution in Paths of Glory, the creepy gangster assigned to watch over hostage Phyllis Kirk in Andre de Toth’s Crime Wave, one of the hell-raising motorcycle gang members in The Wild One and his racetrack marksman in The Killing. Now you can add God Hilliard in The World’s Greatest Sinner to the list of unforgettable Carey performances.

Homicidal hoodlum Johnny Haslett (Timothy Carey) menaces Ellen Lacey (Phyllis Kirk) in Andre De Toth’s underrated noir Crime Wave (1953).

For years the only way you could see The World’s Greatest Sinner was to purchase a DVD-R copy directly from Absolute Films, a website run by Romeo Carey, son of the actor/director. That site is no longer online but as of May 2013, the film has been made available from Absolute Films on Amazon so that is your only option unless TCM airs it again in the future. The World’s Greatest Sinner was previously showcased on their late night franchise, Underground. This is one movie that sorely needs a remastering and maybe someone will come to the rescue someday like Arrow Films or Kino Lorber.

*This is a revised and updated version of a post that originally appeared on Movie Morlocks, the official Turner Classic Movies blog (later renamed Streamline).

Other websites of interest:

https://www.filmcomment.com/article/cracked-actor-timothy-carey/

https://thetimothycareyexperience.com/tag/the-carey-family/

https://www.nj.com/entertainment/tv/2008/10/post_5.html

http://www.shockcinemamagazine.com/sinner.html

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

If you went by title alone, Alain Jessua’s Jeu de Massacre (released as The Killing Game in the U.S. and as Comic Book Hero in other territories) suggests it might be a murder mystery or a James Bond-like spy thriller which was still in vogue at the time of the film’s release in 1967. Instead, the film is a witty black comedy about the addictive power of pulp fiction – in this case, a superhero comic book – to ignite dangerous fantasies in readers whose grasp on reality is fragile.

One of the many cartoon panels designed by Guy Peellaert and his team which are featured in Alain Jessua’s pop art black comedy, The Killing Game (1967).

The Killing Game opens with a barrage of comic strip images in bold colors backed by an aggressive pop tune from The Alan Bown Set (one of the late comers in the British Invasion wave) before it abruptly segues to Pierre Meyrand, the film’s narrator and protagonist, who is seated by a lake with three other people.

Jean-Pierre Cassel plays the jaded cartoonist protagonist of 1967’s The Killing Game, directed by Alain Jessua.

Pierre (Jean-Pierre Cassel) confesses, “I dreamt of power, luxury, money and all the pleasures of the earth, all within reach without knowing it. Yet I held the ultimate weapon – the secret. But the occasion never occurred until Bob appeared.”

The secret, of course, is the MacGuffin that drives the narrative but it is only an excuse to examine the dynamics that develop between four people – Pierre and his wife Jacqueline (Claudine Auger), collaborators on a series of popular comic strips, and Bob Neuman (Michel Duchaussoy), a wealthy Swiss playboy, and his possessive mother Genevieve (Eleonare Hirt).

The four main characters of Alain Jessua’s The Killing Game (1967) have their own secret agendas and schemes.

Told in flashback, The Killing Game quickly establishes Pierre and Jacqueline as a Parisian couple who are living beyond their means. He was once a highly successful writer of comic strips which were brilliantly illustrated by his wife with often fantastic scenes of sex and violence. Now they are deep in debt with no publishing offers on the horizon until fate intervenes with the unexpected arrival of Bob, an effusive fan who loves the couple’s work.

A scene from The Killing Game (1967): Jacqueline (Claudine Auger), the wife of a cartoonist, toys with Bob (Michel Duchaussoy), a wealthy but delusional playboy…or is she the prey?

Bob reveals that many of the fantastical adventures depicted in their comic strips are similar to his own life and goes into detail about his experiences in the Foreign Legion, travels in Indochina and near-death encounters fighting the Viet Cong. Is Bob telling the truth or delusional?

The couple at first dismiss Bob as a bore and a fool until he and his mother offer them an extended vacation – and possibly permanent residence at their Swiss estate situated on a lake in idyllic surroundings with servants at their beck and call. It certainly solves their current financial crisis but it also results in the solution to Pierre’s writer’s block. Bob’s overactive imagination and anti-social behavior – he almost gets arrested by the local cops when he terrorizes swimmers and fisherman with his speedboat – inspires Pierre to create a new comic book daredevil, inspired by Bob, called “The Killer of Neuchatel” (named after the medieval Swiss town where the Neuman family live).

Bob (Michel Duchaussoy) becomes the model for the daredevil adventurer “The Killer of Neuchatel” in The Killing Game (1967).

Good fortune and success shine on Pierre and Jacqueline but it comes with a price as Bob begins acting out in real life the fictional exploits of his comic book alter ego. Without revealing too many details, The Killing Game culminates in a surreal, No Exit resolution in which everyone gets what they deserve – and probably actually desire.

Other directors might have presented this tale as a psychological drama or a straightforward melodrama but Jessua, who also wrote the screenplay, chooses a tone which is light, playful and quirky. The Killing Game is also tightly paced, unpredictable and consistently propelled along by Jacques Loussier’s irresistible music score (a melange of jazz, rock big band, spy movie themes and other influences) and dazzling, pop art comic book panels created by Guy Peellaert and his team.

The cover for Rock Dreams, the 1974 collaboration between writer Nik Cohn & graphic artist Guy Peellaert.

Peellaert was a Belgium artist who first gained fame as the creator of the popular 1966 French comic strip, Les Aventures de Jodelle, and later collaborated with British rock journalist Nik Cohn on the best-selling graphic book Rock Dreams. After that, Peellaert became the go-to artist for musicians like David Bowie (Diamond Dogs) and The Rolling Stones (It’s Only Rock ’n Roll) as well as film poster designer for directors Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver), Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire) and others.

Pierre (Jean-Pierre Cassel, left) and Ado (Guy Saint-Jean) pursue the unpredictable Bob, who might be capable of murder and worse in The Killing Game (1967).

Another major virtue of The Killing Game is the superb ensemble cast which is headed by Jean-Pierre Cassel, who is both the narrator and main character. Cassel rose to fame in the early sixties playing happy-go-lucky rogues and seductive playboys in the romantic comedies of Phillipe De Broca (The Love Game, The Five Day Lover, Male Companion) but American audiences probably know him best for his roles in big budget, all-star productions like Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers (1974) and its sequel, The Four Musketeers: Milady’s Revenge (1974).

Jean-Pierre Cassel plays a despicable poseur in Claude Chabrol’s La Rupture (1970).

Cassel is particularly effective in dramatic roles when he shows a sinister side to his matinee idol persona as in Claude Chabrol’s La Rupture (aka The Breach, 1970) where he plays a sleazy opportunist hired to ruin a woman’s reputation in a bitter child custody case. The Killing Game gives him an even more complex character to play, one where his smug bon vivant is pulled out of his comfort zone by his own misreading of a supposed sycophant.

Claudine Augar as Bond girl Domino in Thunderball (1965) with Sean Connery.

Claudine Auger, whose most famous role remains Bond girl Domino in Thunderball (1965), was usually cast in mostly decorative roles in her early career but she displays an impressive range in The Killing Game as she goes from being Pierre’s willing accomplice to addressing her own independence and emotional needs with Bob. A key turning point in her problematic marriage occurs when Pierre pompously instructs her in the fine art of lighting and smoking a cigar. “It’s like the beginning of wisdom,” he explains. “Or senility!”, she snaps contemptuously.

Jacqueline (Claudine Augar) sleeps as her husband Pierre (offscreen) studies her body in The Killing Game (1967).

Auger would go on to appear in numerous genre films from romantic comedies (Anyone Can Play, Lovers and Liars) to crime thrillers (Summertime Killer, Flic Story) to action dramas (Adriatic Sea of Fire, Bloody Sun) but she achieved cult status for her appearance in two giallos – The Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971) and Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood (1971). The latter is particularly memorable for her mean-spirited performance as a greedy, murderous schemer in a plot to inherit an heiress’s estate.

Bob (Michel Duchaussoy) begins to take on characteristics of his comic strip alter ego in The Killing Game (1967), directed by Alain Jessua.

Of course, it is hard to imagine The Killing Game working as well as it does without Michel Duchaussoy in the role of Bob. This was his first major starring role and he is both comical and chilling as a spoiled, childlike mama’s boy who succumbs to delusions of grandeur when given free reign. Like Cassel, Duchaussoy has had a long, prolific career (over 180 films and TV series) that has included such high points as his work for Claude Chabrol (This Man Must Die, Just Before Nightfall, The Nada Gang), Louis Malle (May Fools) and major supporting roles like portraying the father of French gangster Jacques Mesrine (played by Vincent Cassel, son of Jean-Pierre) in the two part biopic by Jean-Francois Richet – Mesrine Part 1: Killer Instinct and Mesrine Part 2: Public Enemy #1 (both 2008).

Bob (Michel Duchaussoy) poses for cartoonist Jacqueline Meyrand (Claudine Augar, offscreen) in this scene from the black comedy The Killing Game (1967).

The Killing Game was Jessua’s second feature film after his promising debut Life Upside Down (1964) and it was an even bigger success in France, winning Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival (it tied with Elio Petri’s We Still Kill the Old Way) as well as being nominated for the Palme d’Or. It was also well received in Europe and the U.S. where most critics praised the film’s frenetic style and droll humor.

Jacqueline (Claudine Augar) is beginning to respond to Bob’s infatuation with her despite being married in The Killing Game (1967), co-starring Michel Duchaussoy (pictured).

So what happened to it? The film is virtually forgotten today but a revival of it couldn’t be more timely with the rise in popularity of movies based on Marvel and DC Comics. Unfortunately, Jessua didn’t make another film for almost six years. His next project after The Killing Game, a sci-fi epic entitled Le Planet Bleu, never materialized but he eventually bounced back with Treatment du Choc (aka Shock Treatment) in 1973. It was about a chic health spa for the wealthy which specialized in rejuvenation treatments. But there was something sinister behind the operation that was connected to the disappearance of numerous Portuguese immigrants. Even though the film featured a cast headed by Alain Delon and Annie Girardot, it barely got released in the U.S. and his subsequent films (Armaguedon, The Dogs, Frankenstein 90, etc.) found no distribution outlet here.

One of the cartoon panels created for the cartoon strip “The Killer of Neuchatel” in Alain Jessua’s dark satire, The Killing Game (1967).

The Killing Game is currently not available in the U.S. as a DVD or Blu-ray although Studio Canal released it on DVD in France in 2004. That version offers a French language only option and you would need an all-region DVD player to view it. Now that Kino Lorber is releasing more French cinema from the 60s and 70s on Blu-Ray such as Claude Chabrol’s The Third Lover and Rene Clement’s Rider on the Rain, perhaps there is some hope for the future re-mastering and re-release of The Killing Game on DVD/Blu-ray.

Other weblinks of interest:

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

http://www.newwavefilm.com/interviews/alain-jessua-interview.shtml

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/mar/07/jacques-loussier-jazz-bach-10-of-the-best

http://www.newwavefilm.com/french-new-wave-encyclopedia/killing-game.shtml

https://cinemasojourns.com/2015/11/12/fade-to-white/#more-2196

A slice of early Americana. A showcase for some of W.C. Fields’ best gags and funny bits of business. The second screen pairing of two comedic actors that audiences loved seeing together. Tillie and Gus (1933) is all of those plus it marks the first major role of that pesky little Baby LeRoy, soon to be a regular tormentor of Fields. It also includes a scene-stealing trained duck and several eccentric character actors who make perfect foils for the title characters such as Clarence Wilson, George Barbier and Edgar Kennedy. Tillie and Gus might not be my favorite Fields’ movie (that’s a toss-up between The Bank Dick and It’s a Gift) but it is a constant delight and well worth seeing or revisiting for any Fields beginner or hard core fan.

Tom (Phillip Trent, left) and his wife Mary (Julie Bishop) are taken advantage of by crooked lawyer Phineas Pratt (Clarence Wilson) in the W.C. Fields comedy, Tillie and Gus (1933).

The film, directed by Francis Martin, is little more than a flimsy premise held together by a string of sight gags but the loose, rambling style and eccentric pacing are consistently amusing for the duration of its brief 58 minute running time. The story opens with a young couple, Tom and Mary Sheridan (Phillip Trent aka Clifford Jones and Julie Bishop aka Jacqueline Wells), their child (Baby LeRoy) and pet duck, being swindled out of their family home by the executor of the state and local shyster lawyer Phineas Pratt (Clarence Wilson). The Fairy Queen, their only asset which they refused to sell to Pratt, is a broken-down riverboat that they decide to repair and turn into a business venture. But their right to open a competing business is challenged by Pratt with backing from the local sheriff and settled in a 4th of July race between The Keystone (Pratt’s boat) and The Fairy Queen, the winner of which will own the local steamboat trade.

Coming to the rescue are Mary’s distant relatives, Tillie and Gus Winterbottom (Alison Skipworth and W.C. Fields), rumored to be working in China as missionaries. In reality the once-married couple have been separated for years but are reunited for the sake of appearances and the possibility that they stand to inherit money from Mary’s estate. Both experienced con-artists, Tillie and Gus match their wits against the more blatantly dishonest Pratt in a fight that is a blight on the name of good sportsmanship and justice and completely American in its comical irreverence.

My Little Chickadee (1940)
Directed by Edward Cline
Shown: Mae West, W.C. Fields

Although Fields’ most famous female partner-in-crime was Mae West in My Little Chickadee (1940), a disappointment that compromised and straight-jacketed both comic’s best qualities, Skipworth is a much better match for him, complimenting his eccentricities with her own cockeyed brand of humor. They clicked together on screen so well in their segment of If I Had a Million (1932), that Paramount reteamed them for this and Six of a Kind (1934).

In many of her comedies, Skipworth plays crafty opportunists posing as grande dames or high society matrons like her character in the Carole Lombard comedy, The Princess Comes Across (1936) – an underrated treat if you haven’t seen it. In Tillie and Gus, Skipworth plays a former gambling club owner and her first reunion scene with Fields in a train station ticket office is classic – she instinctively reaches for the gun in her purse to shoot him on sight (“The passing years have slowed you on the draw, my little chickadee,” Fields says to her as he grabs the gun). But they quickly put their differences aside for purely financial reasons, resulting in some very amusing scams and escapades, with their sabotaging of The Keystone a high point.

W.C. Fields finds himself in another fine mess in Tillie and Gus (1933).

Fields reprises the famous poker game sequence from his stage production of Poppy (later filmed as a movie in 1936), displays his dexterity with various coin and hat tricks and in one of Tillie and Gus‘s best scenes, tries to mix paint while following the instructions of a radio announcer. Intended as a parody of the “Handy Andy” broadcasts of its day, the routine was almost vetoed by the film’s producer Douglas MacLean because he didn’t think it was funny or advanced the storyline. Luckily, the scene was not cut from the movie and has a wild, improvisational quality like many of Fields’ sight gags, most of them as fresh and funny today as they were then. It’s quite possible this paint-mixing scene – with its escalating pace and resulting chaos – was the inspiration for that frantic chocolate factory assembly line sequence in a famous “I Love Lucy” episode.

A publicity still of W.C. Fields, Baby Leroy and Alison Skipworth from Tillie and Gus (1933).

Equally funny are the encounters between Fields and Baby LeRoy, referred to here as “The King,” and the film is brimming with Fields’ comic revulsion of children. In fact, he makes his feelings quite clear early in the film in this exchange (which is a reworking of a famous Jonathan Swift quote):

Tillie: Do you like children?

Gus: I do if they’re properly cooked.

Baby LeRoy is a mischievous little prankster throughout and his clueless behavior almost leads to the loss of the all-important riverboat race and to his own demise as well, situations that are played for lighthearted laughs. In fact, a good deal of the humor derived from Baby LeRoy comes from placing him in harm’s way such as having him plopped in a bathtub and then yanked overboard into the river’s current, knowing he will gleefully pull the plug out of the floating bathtub just to see what happens.

A publicity still from The Old Fashioned Way (1934) starring Baby Leroy and W.C. Fields.

Fields’ true feelings toward Baby LeRoy differ depending on whose biography of Fields you read. He obviously realized LeRoy was a great foil for his humor and a key factor in the success of Tillie and Gus, The Old Fashioned Way (1934) and It’s a Gift (1934). According to James Curtis in his biography, W.C. Fields, the youngster’s temperamental behavior caused many delays in the filming of Tillie and Gus: “The principal shot in which Fields held the child lasted just forty seconds, but it began to look as if it would take an entire day to make.” [Fields later said] “We took the scene over and over again for hours on end. They gave the child a drink of water…They gave him his milk bottle…I told his nurse to get me a racing form and I would play nurse until she returned. I quietly removed the nipple from Baby LeRoy’s bottle, dropped in a couple of noggins of gin, and returned it to Baby LeRoy. After sucking on the pacifier for a few minutes, he staggered through the scene like a Barrymore.” Fields’ account of this has passed into history but he was famous for embellishing or stretching the truth when relating anecdotal stories.

Simon Louvish in his book, Man on the Flying Trapeze: The Life and Times of W.C. Fields, wrote that LeRoy, in later years, “could not recall the actor ever being mean to him. The legends of Bill spiking his orange juice with gin, on the set of It’s a Gift, may well be true, but Fields may have been simply initiating him thus into his inner circle. Certainly he was keen to have the Baby on board, as his most effective and challenging straight man. Production stills from Tillie and Gus show Fields holding the legendary brat on his shoulders with cheerful sang-froid.”

Child actors Shirley Temple and Baby Leroy enjoy ice cream sodas in this publicity shot.

Baby LeRoy, who real name was Le Roy Overacker, had a relatively brief career, 9 films & 1 comedy short within a three year period. But he holds the distinction of being the youngest actor to ever receive star billing and made his screen debut in A Bedtime Story (1933) when he was not yet one year old (Baby Peggy was 3 years old and Shirley Temple was four when they began their careers).

Slimeball lawyer Phineas Pratt (Clarence Wilson) threatens Gus (W.C. Fields) and Tillie (Alison Skipworth) in a publicity still from Tillie and Gus (1933).

Like many of W.C. Fields’ features and shorts, Tillie and Gus, once available on DVD, went out of print but was later re-released by the Universal Vault Collection in 2015 and is still available. But with the exception of two silent Fields comedies – Running Wild (1927) and It’s the Old Army Game (1926), released by Kino Lorber in 2018, Paramount has not to my knowledge licensed or released any other W.C. Fields comedies and shorts on Blu-Ray in remastered editions, which is a shame because the image and audio quality on most of the still available Fields’s titles on DVD are disappointing. Even The Criterion Collection DVD release of The Bank Dick could use a major upgrade.

*This is a revised and updated version of an article that originally appeared on Movie Morlocks (later renamed Filmstruck), the official blog of Turner Classic Movies.

Alison Skipworth (center at gambling table) plays a con-artist masquerading as a missionary opposite W.C. Fields in Tillie and Gus (1933).

Other websites of interest:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-apr-05-et-king5-story.html

https://travsd.wordpress.com/2016/07/25/hall-of-hams-105-alison-skipworth/

http://moviessilently.com/2018/03/13/unboxing-the-silents-two-w-c-fields-silent-films-on-bluray-from-kino-with-bonus-louise-brooks/

https://catalog.afi.com/Film/7875-TILLIE-AND-GUS?sid=07839617-0f35-4d23-932c-7ef93d8720d0&sr=4.082419&cp=1&pos=0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZgl2BfCsBg

In the disaster film genre, Krakatoa, East of Java (1969) holds the distinction of being the only one presented in the Cinerama widescreen format but is also the most erroneously titled movie of all time. As many historians and movie critics have pointed out, Krakatoa is west of Java but veracity is not one of Hollywood’s strengths in producing historical epics. And Krakatoa, East of Java is not a factual recreation of the famous 1883 volcanic eruption in the Indian Ocean but a lavish B-movie adventure that uses the cataclysmic event only as the background and climactic resolution to its cavalcade of international stars and multiple subplots that play out as pure soap opera.

The storyline shares some similarities with the Fred MacMurray period adventure, Fair Wind to Java (1953), in which there are numerous character subplots and a climax featuring the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano.

A scene from Krakatoa, East of Java (1969), which was also released under the title Volcano.

Synopsis: Captain Chris Hanson (Maximilian Schell) has gathered together a select group of individuals for a deep sea diving mission with the objective of locating a sunken ship off the coast of Krakatoa that contains a fortune in pearls. Laura Travis (Diane Baker), the source of Hanson’s information, however, has little credibility among her fellow passengers. She is still recovering from a mental breakdown brought on by an abusive husband who abandoned her and hijacked their son Peter when she began an affair with Captain Hanson.

Diane Baker and Maximilian Schell head the cast of the Cinerama disaster epic, Krakatoa, East of Java (1969).

Joining them on the expedition are Douglas Rigby (former British pop singer John Leyton), an oceanographer with claustrophobia; The Flying Borgheses (Rossano Brazzi and Sal Mineo), a father-son balloonist team; Connerly (Brian Keith), a laudanum-addicted deep sea diver and his mistress Charley (Barbara Werle), a former saloon hostess; Toshi (Jacqueline Chan), an experienced pearl diver and her all-girl Japanese team; plus a human cargo of thirty chained prisoners that Capt. Hanson was ordered by the government to transport to a penal colony near Krakatoa.

Jacqueline Chen, John Leyton (center) and Sal Mineo are among the supporting cast of Krakatoa, East of Java (1969), nominated for Best Special Effects Oscar.

Mix in a drug induced freak-out scene by Connerly, a musical striptease by Charley, a mutiny of the prisoners led by the villainous Dauzig (J. D. Cannon), a near-fatal balloon accident, and the constant special effects rumblings and eruptions of the Krakatoa volcano and you have a multimillion dollar movie serial that harkens back to the more innocent days of Captain America (1944) and Perils of Nyoka (1942). Film buffs will also notice fleeting appearances by movie villain Marc Lawrence (Key Largo), British character actor Niall MacGinnis (Curse of the Demon) and Trinidad-born dancer/actor Geoffrey Holder (Live and Let Die) in minor roles.

Drug addict Brian Keith has a crazy hallucination in this scene from Krakatoa, East of Java (1969), a Cinerama disaster epic.

For such an expensive, all-star cast production, you’d expect a big name director at the helm. Instead you get Bernard L. Kowalski, who was firmly established as a TV director at this point in his career (The Rebel, The Untouchables, Perry Mason, etc.) and would mostly remain in that field. Cult movie fans, however, know him for such low-budget delights as Hot Car Girl (1958), Night of the Blood Beast (1958) and my personal favorite, Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959).

Clearly the producers of Krakatoa, East of Java were less interested in creating a literate epic on the order of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962) than a slam-bang action entertainment on the level of How the West Was Won (also 1962), which was filmed and presented in the widescreen format known as Cinerama. Krakatoa, East of Java was also a Cinerama presentation though it was actually filmed in Todd-AO and Super Panavision 70. At the time of its release, however, interest in widescreen road-show presentations like Krakatoa was waning. In fact, the peak years for the Cinerama phenomena were between 1952 when This Is Cinerama became the highest grossing film of that year and 1963 when It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was the second ranked box office hit of the year. By the time, Krakatoa, East of Java reached movie screens the Cinerama Releasing Corporation was experiencing financial difficulties and was functioning almost solely as a film distributor (For Love of Ivy and Hell in the Pacific [both 1968] were among some of their acquisitions). The company was liquidated in 1978 and its chain of movie houses was absorbed by Pacific Theaters.

Charley (Barbara Werle) is one of many passengers – and subplots – in the 1969 disaster epic, Krakatoa, East of Java.

Seen outside of its original Cinerama presentation on a movie theater screen, Krakatoa, East of Java must seem like a true oddity now. The film’s producers may have been aiming for a family-friendly adventure epic but, wanting to also attract adult audiences, they added some questionable material – the tortured Connerly-Charley relationship and Laura’s illicit backstory – that seriously detracts from the film’s pacing.

It was no secret that Krakatoa, East of Java was a troubled production. One of the original producers, Phil Yordan (El Cid, King of Kings, both 1961) dropped out of the project after the special effects were shot. After his departure a new associate producer was brought on board and a new screenplay was commissioned. The confusion of tone is constant and often provides unintentional amusement, particularly the inclusion of some inappropriate songs. In an opening sequence, island children are led by nuns in a sing-along – “Teacher, Teacher” – leading us to believe that this is a musical disaster film.

A scene from Krakatoa, East of Java (1969).

During the title credits, we hear the romantic strains of Krakatoa‘s theme song, “Java Girl” (music by De Vol, lyrics by Mack David) over images of filthy prisoners being led into the ship’s hold and sweaty deckhands raising the sails. But the real showstopper is Barbara Werle’s excruciating rendition of “I’m an Old Fashioned Girl” which she performs, stripping off her Victorian era clothes, as a prelude to sex with Brian Keith’s self-destructive loser. In fact, Werle’s character Charley is one of the more absurd characters on board with dialogue to match. “Don’t put labels on jelly jars,” she angrily tells Giovanni Borghese (Rossano Brazzi) when he insults her man. “I’ve seen the nice guys with the smiling faces and white collars pinch bottoms and I’ve seen the mean one pinch bottoms too. So don’t tell me about labels. I’ve seen the one they’ve put on Harry.”

Barbara Werle and Brian Keith are among the many passengers on a ship bound for Krakatoa, East of Java (1969), a disaster epic by Bernard L. Kowalski.

Krakatoa, East of Java was not a financial success and most critics trashed it when it opened. The San Francisco Chronicle stated that “those who made it have absolutely no skill in story-telling” and the New York Daily News noted that “by the time they have dunked you in a raging volcano; deafened you with underwater explosions; scorched you with volcanic fireworks, and, finally drowned you in a tidal wave, you will be too numb to notice how really unexciting and uninvolving it all is.”

A lighthouse is engulfed by a tidal wave in this scene from the Cinerama disaster epic, Krakatoa, East of Java (1969).

Nevertheless, the film found a few advocates to champion its merits. Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times called it “one of the best movies ever made in Cinerama” and even wrote, “Rich in the atmosphere of exotic faraway places, it is so buoyant and bracing you can almost smell the sea air.” Even Gary Arnold of The Washington Post found it refreshing: “In a week dominated by terminal cases of wretched big screen photography – Mackenna’s Gold with its livid process shots in Super Panavision and Sweet Charity with its TV color and Brobdignaggian close-ups in 70 mm Panavision – Krakatoa, East of Java seemed rather pleasant.”

Diane Baker and British pop singer John Leyton are featured in this German lobbycard from Krakatoa, East of Java (1969).

The film received another popular endorsement when it was honored with an Academy Award nomination for Best Special Effects by Eugene Lourie and Alex Weldon (it lost to Marooned). Admittedly, the visual effects are fun though hokey and the rear-screen projection, matte paintings, process shots and stuntwork look quaint by today’s CGI standards. Although the film has some dull longuers, disaster film addicts should enjoy it for its campy dialogue and rampant absurdity which is almost as enjoyably bad as The Poseidon Adventure (1972).

A scene from the opening screen credits for Krakatoa, East of Java (1969).

Interestingly enough, Krakatoa, East of Java enjoyed a second life in theatrical release under the title of Volcano in the seventies when films in “Sensurround” such as Earthquake (1974) became the rage (Krakatoa, East of Java was reprocessed and released in “Feelarama,” a variation of Sensurround.)

A still from the Oscar-nominated disaster epic Krakatoa, East of Java (1969), which was re-released under the title Volcano.

Discrepancies continue today over the original running time of the film which the American Film Institute website (afi.org) lists as being released in versions of 143 minutes, 132 minutes and 127 minutes (minus the opening overture, intermission and exit music) though some re-edited versions have resurfaced on television and in 35mm and 16mm prints with a running time of 101 minutes.

The all-star cast of the disaster epic Krakatoa, East of Java (1969) includes (from left) Brian Keith, Barbara Werle, Jacqueline Chen, John Leyton, Rossano Brazzi (in foreground) and Sal Mineo.

Krakatoa, East of Java has been available on DVD from various distributors over the years such as a 2005 release from MGM but the way to go is the KL Studio Classics Blu-Ray released by Kino Lorber in 2017 which is a handsome presentation of the film which clocks in at 131 minutes. The only extra is some trailers for other disaster films like Meteor (1979), which is a real slog compared to Krakatoa.

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

Other weblinks of interest:

https://www.livescience.com/28186-krakatoa.html

http://www.bewaretheblog.com/2017/12/krakatoa-west-not-east-of-java-1883.html

https://trailersfromhell.com/krakatoa-east-of-java/

https://classictvhistory.wordpress.com/2007/12/21/in-memoriam-bernard-l-kowalski-1929-2007/

https://www.in70mm.com/library/engagements/film/k/krakatoa/index.htm

http://johnleytonofficial.com/biography/

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

Man-on-the-street interviews can often be unexpectedly hilarious, insightful or surprising if the interviewer is a prankster like Triumph The Insult Comic Dog or a non-traditional reporter such as an anthropologist, professional prostitute or ….a pair of nuns. The latter, in fact, are showcased in the 1968 documentary, Inquiring Nuns, which is not an oddball stunt but a sincere attempt to capture some honest responses about the human condition via two unlikely interviewers. It was produced by Kartemquin Films, the non-profit documentary collective that was founded in 1966 in Chicago by Gordon Quinn, Jerry Temaner and Stan Karter and has produced such acclaimed work as Hoop Dreams (1995), Vietnam, Long Time Coming (1998), the PBS miniseries The New Americans (2004) and The Interrupters (2011).

Divided into two segments, approximately a half hour in length each, Inquiring Nuns was filmed in Chicago in 1967 and follows two young nuns as they interview people from all walks of life in different locales around Chicago – outside churches, supermarkets, in the Museum of Science and Technology, the Art Institute of Chicago and along the Loop, the city’s central business district. What could have been little more than a quirky experiment becomes a fascinating and rich sociological study of people reacting – either candidly or guardedly – to the questions of two rather guileless interviewers.

Inquiring Nuns (1968), a documentary by Gordon Quinn & Jerry Temaner

The documentary, which occasionally turns up in retrospective screenings at movie theaters and film festivals, opens with an establishing shot of Chicago and a funky urban organ riff by composer Philip Glass who provides the music score (according to IMDB, this is his first film credit). We are then introduced to Sister Mary Campion and Sister Marie Arne being briefed by the director in a van as they travel to their interview location.

Inquiring Nuns (1968), a documentary by Gordon Quinn & Jerry Temaner

We are given no information on how these two women were chosen by filmmakers Gordon Quinn and Gerald Temaner as their on-camera interviewers or how the project was conceived but it is obvious that the approach is going to be loose and improvisational. Both nuns are completely inexperienced in interviewing and question their role in the project. Sister Campion asks “Are we going to pick whoever we want to or is that going to make any difference?” while Sister Arne worries that “I’m not sure what our goal is. Really, what do we want from the people?”

After being shown how to hold the microphone, Sister Campion accepts that responsibility while Sister Arne still seems unconvinced that people won’t ask, “What are you nutty nuns doing?” As a reference, one of the filmmakers mentions a French documentary from the New Wave period which influenced him. He might be referring to Jean Roach and Edgar Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961) in which Parisians responded to the question “Are you happy?” or possibly Chris Marker’s influential Le Moi Mal (1963). Using that same tactic, the two sisters soon hit the street (across from the now extinct Burny Bros. Bakery) and approach strangers with variations of “Are you happy?,” “What makes you happy?” and “What makes you unhappy?”

Inquiring Nuns (1968), a documentary by Gordon Quinn & Jerry Temaner

While the questions are relatively banal, the results are often surprising candid or just as flat and boring as the unimaginative solicitation; it really depends on the chemistry and interaction between the nuns and their subjects. Some interviewees, in deference to their ecumenical interviewers, appear cautious and chose their words carefully or speak in generalities while others become fully engaged and even challenge their questioners with the same question. What is wonderful to see is the wide range of people polled – Russian and Polish immigrants, college students, museum patrons, musicians, housewives and African-American church-goers. And one topic continues to surface though it is never explored in any depth – Vietnam. It pops up in the first interview with the female singer of a band called Bubblegum Orgy who is asked if she sees any obstacles in her search for happiness. “Vietnam,” she says without hesitation, adding, “And President Johnson. He’s a crook and a phony.” It becomes a refrain throughout Inquiring Nuns, indicative of a major problem that is affecting everyone’s mental state and attitude.

Inquiring Nuns (1968), a documentary by Gordon Quinn & Jerry Temaner featuring interviewee Stepin Fetchit (center).

Among the first interviewees we see is the legendary and still controversial African-American entertainer Stepin Fetchit aka Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry (1902-1985). Accompanied by a friend who claims to be the songwriter of “One Little Candle,” Father Keller’s theme song on the 1952 TV series “The Christophers,” the 76-year old actor begins pulling out a stack of publicity shots from his coat to show the nuns, “Here’s Danny Thomas…Here’s me and Shirley Temple. Here’s me and Will Rogers. Here’s me and Robert Goulet.”

Publicity shot of Hollywood character actor Stepin Fetchit.

The conversation quickly shifts to a religious confessional with Stepin Fetchit noting, “I’ve been the first Negro millionaire that you had years ago…I blew seven million dollars and in all that time I was in daily communion….If everybody could go to communion, there would be no suffering.” In most of the interviews, unhappiness, in general, is equated with financial woes, a lack of faith, a bad attitude or someone’s born disposition. Curiously, race relations or discrimination does not surface as a discussion topic at any point.

Inquiring Nuns (1968), a documentary by Gordon Quinn & Jerry Temaner

Instead, people seem more philosophical or introspective. Outside a supermarket, one woman states, “Well, there are three big things that make people happy or are responsible for happiness. Sex, social life…ummmm, what’s the other? [pauses briefly] Your work. And then somehow you wind up being thwarted in one degree or another in one of these things….little things make me happy, sleeping late, things like that.” A serious-looking gentleman in the Art Institute of Chicago reveals that, “I have moments of disappointment but if you mean in the generic sense, in the larger philosophical sense, no. I never ask myself that. I take that for granted. If I didn’t, I might cut my throat. I would.” He delivers those last words almost as a provocation and with resolute certainty but the nuns never flinch and take everything in stride, rarely registering anything other than an all-accepting openness.

Inquiring Nuns (1968), a documentary by Gordon Quinn & Jerry Temaner

One of the more thought-provoking interviewees in Inquiring Nuns ponders the intent of the nun’s question, asking, “Well in what context? Am I personally happy or professionally happy? Am I religiously happy? I’m professionally dissatisfied because I want to do better. Personally I’m happy. I’d like to have peace in Vietnam. In that sense, I’m unhappy but how can you ask a person to throw everything into one category? I don’t think it’s an unfair question. I think it’s an irrelevant question.” When the questioning continues with, “Are you searching for happiness in life,” he says, “No. Satisfaction, maybe I’d use that word…Happiness is a word like conformity, like togetherness I shy away from…Happiness has become a societal word…Happiness is far too complicated a subject to bandy around…it’s very important and consequently very hard to define.”

Inquiring Nuns (1968), a documentary by Gordon Quinn & Jerry Temaner

What is particularly refreshing about Inquiring Nuns is the simple and unpretentious way in which it is filmed and edited. With the two nuns always at the center of every scene, the interviewees are rarely distracted by the cameraman who is able to capture their responses and facial expressions from a privileged viewpoint. One is also struck by the way people looked and dressed during the late sixties in an urban mecca like Chicago. There is a strong sense of fashion on display across all socio-economic levels. People used to dress up more. From the evidence on display, there’s no denying it and we look like slobs in comparison today.

Inquiring Nuns (1968), a documentary by Gordon Quinn & Jerry Temaner

The documentary concludes with Sister Campion and Sister Arne assessing the entire experience as they return home in the van. While both of them were never less than totally committed to what they were doing, they acknowledge that connecting with their interviewee on some level and winning their confidence is key, even if they weren’t always successful. Inquiring Nuns might have been an even more potent and insightful snapshot of its era if the sisters had pursued or explored some of the issues raised during their rote questions. Whether they were simply following the filmmakers’ instructions to the letter or were too shy and hesitate to go off-topic when the situation presented itself is hard to know. But occasionally, when they do dig a little deeper in their questioning, the results can be quite moving such as the final interview that appears in the film with a middle-aged female musician who was visiting Chicago while on tour with an opera company. At first a bit guarded in her responses, the woman slowly drops her mask, revealing something personal and touching. “Well, I could be happier,” she admits, “Someone told me the other day that I needed someone that would want me, that would need me and I think that’s partly true.” There is something very sad and searching in her manner before she turns the question back on the nuns with “Are you happy?”

Inquiring Nuns (1968), a documentary by Gordon Quinn & Jerry Temaner

Inquiring Nuns remains fascinating for the little glimpses into human behavior it gives us but I can’t imagine this same scenario with two nun interviewers being a viable documentary approach today. For one thing, most potential interviewees would probably think the nuns were poseurs – not the real thing – and would treat them like a comic street theatre act. Also, everyone is so much more conditioned and self-aware in regards to media now whereas the interviewees in Inquiring Nuns still have an innocence about them due to a culture that was not yet inundated with pervasive TV screens, the internet, email and social networks.

Inquiring Nuns (1968), a documentary by Gordon Quinn & Jerry Temaner

I couldn’t help wondering what happened to Sister Campion and Sister Arne after they returned to their convent but I found the answer on the official Kartemquin web site. Andrew Hermann of the Chicago Sun-Times did a follow up feature on Inquiring Nuns in 2008 and here is an excerpt from that which ties back directly to that final and poignant interview in the film: “One subject..turns the question back on the nuns and asks them, “Are you happy?” They both quickly reply “yes,” but for Sister Campion, “It was an ah-hah moment,” recalled the woman now known as Catherine Rock.

Inquiring Nuns (1968), a documentary by Gordon Quinn & Jerry Temaner

“I was always smiling but it was a naive kind of happy. I was never introspective about it. But when that girl said to me, ‘Are you happy?’ It all of a sudden dawned on me, ‘Well maybe I’m not,” Rock said Thursday from her home in Florida. Rock would leave the convent in 1969, marry, have three children and become a school superintendent in New Jersey. Sister Arne also would leave and, as Kathleen Westling, would become a wife, mother and family counselor in Western Springs.”

Gordon Quinn, co-director of the 1968 documentary Inquiring Nuns.

Inquiring Nuns is still available as a stand alone DVD with no extras from Kartemquin and other video outlets. Kartemquin has announced that it does plan a Blu-ray release in the near future.

*This is an updated and revised version of an article that first appeared on Movie Morlocks (later renamed Streamline), the official Turner Classic Movies blog.

Other websites of interest:

http://kartemquin.com/films/inquiring-nuns

https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/steinberg-inquiring-nuns-1967-documentary-chicago-kartemquin-films-ebert/

https://nonfics.com/inquiring-nuns-review/

http://moviemezzanine.com/kartemquin-essay/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8qbTaoXrmc