Fritz and K.D. Lang

I’ll be posting the results of our Shadowplay Fritz Lang songwriting contest late tomorrow. But it’s not too late for any last-minute entries.

A young man is full of adventure,
and eager to do what he can!
He may be a boy, but don’t send a boy
To do the work of a man!
Get away — get away
Get away, young man, get away!
A young man will come when you call him,
And leave when you tell him to go,
But some day he’ll guess, a woman means yes,
Whenever a woman says no!
Get away…
A woman is only a creature
Of notions and dimples and lies
So learn if you can, this lesson, young man,
And don’t run off when she cries
Get away —get away…..
If you can! 

~ From Ken Darby’s song Get Away, Young Man, from Fritz Lang’s RANCHO NOTORIOUS.

And…

I’m a shadow since you’re gone
Just a shadow in the dawn
That breaks in the sand
A shadow lost in shadowland
My poor heart just flew away
When it realized one day
The dreams that we planned
Would only end in shadowland

~ From Shadowland, by K.D. Lang.

Euphoria #51: Mother’s Day

This might seem an odd way to celebrate Mother’s Day, but what can I say? My Mum likes Richard Widmark. And there’s no way you can avoid smiling when he does THAT LAUGH.

Director Henry Hathaway had to be forced to use Widmark in this film. Hard to judge without seeing H.H.’s preferred choice, but it looks to me like Hathaway was Dead Wrong. Widmark — doing his own laugh — is a force of nature in this. What’s even more remarkable and wonderful is that very quickly he was able to break out of playing bad guys and give us some great tortured heroes and anti-heroes.

From Tommy Udo to Harry Fabian.

The Chills #2: Insect Politics

 

This clip is from a horror movie, but that’s not actually the kind of chills I’m talking about. What this is, is a collection of those film scenes that rend the veil of mundanity and make you feel hooked into the Great Beyonderness of Things, that bring a poetic, indefinable insight to bear and open up possibilities undreamed-of, and make you feel awe and panicky joy and the exact physical sensations you felt that time Hervé Villachaise caressed your spine with an icicle.

Here’s Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis and John Getz in Cronenberg’s THE FLY. I would have to say this sequence, which GETS ME every damn time, is a compendium of many different emotions produced by many different things.

Howard Shore’s music is a huge part of it — if you watch a string of early Cronenbergs you get to hear Shore go from barely adequate to really, really good, quite rapidly. THE BROOD is kinda bland. SCANNERS is a rather weak PSYCHO riff, then VIDEODROME starts to get better and then THE FLY arrives and kicks ass.

And the performances are lovely, especially Goldblum, who’s perfectly cast and has perfect counterpart in Davis. John Getz properly comes into his own in THE FLY II, which is a pretty bad film but his single scene is TERRIFIC.

It’s really the dialogue that’s the core of it for me. The script is by Charles Edward Pogue and David Cronenberg, one of the few times Cronenberg adapted another writer’s script. Pogue has been very complimentary about the results, which is rare with screenwriters — we’re so used to having people trample our work with hobnailed boots while jabbering inanely like a Barbary macaque. It’s humbling when somebody comes along and actually IMPROVES what we’ve written, and is SENSITIVE to what we were trying to do with the thing in the first place.

Back in 1986 it probably couldn’t be predicted that Cronenberg would soon be concentrating more on adaptations than on originals, subtly Cronenbergerizing them while remaining very true to the values of the source material. He’d already made THE DEAD ZONE, one of the very few decent Stephen King adaptations (the key would seem to be excavating the valuable stuff that touches chords and makes King’s work so popular, and finding a new shape for it once you’ve removed the buckets of MATTER that fill out King’s doorstop volumes – perhaps exploiting the lacunae created by swinging cuts to create mystery, the way Kubrick did in THE SHINING) and was about to bring us NAKED LUNCH and M. BUTTERFLY and CRASH…

Dialogue often gets short shrift in discussion of cinema. I take the view that great cinema is that which uses its tools to create a unified effect that is either powerful or complex or both, and dialogue can as well be a part of that as anything else. It can’t totally dominate, but then to get a unified effect from cinema, which is kind of a fusion of many art forms, no one part can completely dominate. If it’s JUST cool photography or great editing, that doesn’t make great cinema either. I heard Richard Stanley say the other day that cinema “doesn’t LIKE dialogue,” which struck me as, well, WRONG, and certainly out of keeping with my experience of cinema. Stanley, like his idol Argento, doesn’t write good dialogue, or film it particularly well, or get very good performances, so maybe it’s a matter of being attuned to the virtues of screen talk. It’s true that cinema started off without the ability to talk, but it started without precisely synchronised music and sound effects too, and I know of few purists who think those are a burden on film art (though there are certainly people who choose not to use them, which is just fine).

So, the dialogue, the score, also the lighting, the rather lovely creature make-up, the way Goldblum’s eyes move (and when he looks UP and his eyes roll, he’s strangely reminiscent of Michael Anderson, the Man from Another Place in TWIN PEAKS — something about the cheekbones, I think) and when Goldblum is on the roof, he’s suddenly Lon Chaney in our memories of both THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME and the film we’re watching suddenly seems not only thematically super-rich (disease, aging, love, death, rebirth) but hooked into a whole rich history of monster movies.

What we’ve got here is SCREEN POETRY my friends. And what I’ve got is the chills.

(More chills soon. And I would LOVE for you to nominate your own examples.)