The Mario Bava Film School #2

I guess cats really do look bigger when they rear up!

 

Either that, or it’s a really small chair.

SingAlongaLang

 

Results are IN for our strange and misconceived Fritz Lang songwriting competition!

We have three terrific runners-up. Regular Shadowplayer Alex Livingston weighed in with an introduction from Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) in M: THE MUSICAL:

‘I have to kill children to silence the voices,
they demand and demand and they leave me no choices.

‘So I spend all my money on balloonses and toyses.
To entice small children (girlses or boyses),

‘In their school uniforms, or best Sunday cardigans,
Down lonely dark alleys, to deserted backyard-igans.

‘The urges are boilers and the voices have stoked ‘em,
“I’d shout “run!” to the child, but I’ve already choked ‘em.’

When you see it put like that, the idea of a musical M comes to seem… worryingly plausible.

“Mammy!”

Star film-supplier Brandon (sorry, don’t know your last name) offered this short but sweet song for Edward G Robinson (and why has it taken this long for him to have one?)

‘Pursued by greedy men without inhibitions,
Hemmed in by geometric compositions,
Framed by bad paintings and women in windows,
At least my career’s better than Delroy Lindo’s.’

Funny, atmospheric, and above all TRUE.

Darryl McCarthy chimed in with an honorable entry, channelling the fugitive consciousness of Phil Spector to bring us THIS:

‘M’s so fine,
Doo-Lang, doo-Lang, doo-Lang,
M’s so fine,
Rot-Wang, Rot-Wang, Rot-Wang,
That handsome boy over there,
Doo-Lang, doo-Lang, doo-Lang,
The one with the wavy hair,
Rot-Wang, Rot-Wang, Rot-Wang,
etc etc
(sorry Chiffons, sorry everyone).

No need for apologies! The appropriateness of borrowing from a songwriter who’s actually been accused of murdering a film star seems unassailable.

Honorable mentions go to Mr. Lyrics himself, David Ehrenstein, for his many apt quotations (I especially enjoyed reading Nat King Cole’s song from THE BLUE GARDENIA — easy to forget the fever-dream collaboration of Cole and Lang!) and to the shadowy Comrade K for this evocative title: 

‘Here’s one for a musical SECRET BEHIND THE DOOR: “There’s a Room In My Heart (where your body lies bleeding)”‘

All of the above will receive a specially selected film of their dreams. How this will be done remains to be seen. But the overall winner has to be actual singing music-person Daniel Prendiville for the epic that is ~

THE BALLAD OF CHRISTOPHER CROSS

(with apologies to all concerned)

Well my name is Chris Cross
And I feel at a loss
Been a lowly book-keeper for years
And I wed sweet Adele
Who has made my life hell
And it’s driven me almost to tears

When Johnny hit Kitty
I felt full of pity
So much so I laid him out flat
Then I ran to the cops
Cause I’d busted his chops
But dear Kitty was knocked out at that

I told her I painted
And she nearly fainted
As dollar signs flashed in her eyes
While I fell besotted
With Johnny she plotted
I was too naive to realise

So I got her a flat
With some finances that
I embezzled at night from my boss
There my paintings I stored
Cause Adele had abhorred
My artwork as frivolous dross

Then a dealer came round
And thought he had found
In Kitty an artist supreme
And Adele’s ex appeared
Hadn’t died as she’d feared
It had all been a Dallas-like dream

But then Johnny and Kitty
Behaved intimitty
I saw them and became deranged
So I acted impulsive
Did something repulsive
Now my life will forever be changed…

(c) 2008 Daniel Prendiville

Daniel also wins the film of his dreams. And I look forward to hearing this on his next album. Reward him for this free entertainment by going HERE and buying his music! YOU will be the true winner.

Footnote: both the first MABUSE and METROPOLIS feature erotic dances in elaborate production numbers, where the design is incredibly lavish, but no actual choreography has been worked out. So the girls just kind of SPAZZ OUT, to use a politically incorrect but undeniably evocative phrase. It’s a little odd, since Lang notoriously charted out his actors’ movements in their regular scenes with all the precision of dance numbers.

Great Big Feet Smell Something Horrible*

 

We go to see CLOVERFIELD. En route, we pass a tiny boy micturating in the street. He calls to his family just as we pass: “Good thing them people didn’t see ma willy!”

But we DO see CLOVERFIELD.

As Manhattan descends into chaos and looters attack an electronics store, the protags shelter in the shadow of Sephora. “I’d be raiding Sephora,” Fiona remarked.

We dig the little monsters (little things — scarier than big things) and the noise they make, a sort of rapid Three Stooges attack cry; “Eing-eing-eing-eing!” The scariest sound heard in Manhattan since the days of Fulci’s THE NEW YORK RIPPER (who sounded like an angry Donald Duck. Terrifying, actually terrifying!)

Quite early on in this movie I figure out what it is. “It’s a 9:11 nostalgia movie,” I say to Fiona afterwards. “It harks back to the brief time when America could see itself as an innocent victim of an unprovoked attack by a completely inexplicable force.”

At the time, there didn’t seem anything comforting about that idea. But as the moment fades somewhat, it maybe becomes tempting to look back with yearning at that bygone innocence. Thanks to Mr. Bush’s policies, much of the USA has lost that sense of being on the side of righteousness, and more recent movies tackling the Iraq and Alghan wars head-on have tended to be at least somewhat critical of US policy. In fact, the first fictional treatment of the Iraq invasion, Joe Dante’s Masters of Horror episode Homecoming, used a B-movie zombie attack as thin camouflage for a visceral all-out assault on the Bush neo-con administration.

CLOVERFIELD manages to have its conservative cake and eat it, though, because there’s a suggestion that the monster is self-generated, a rogue government project. This is what Hud speculates late in the action, and it’s given a tiny bit of added weight by the title: is the “Cloverfield project” something set up to deal with the inexplicable monster, or was it a pre-existing project that developed the beast in the first place?

The film’s politics are enjoyably incoherent: is the headless Statue of Liberty a metaphor for something? Of course, the upper reaches of Lady Lib have been closed to the public since 9:11, so that’s suggestive. The attack on Manhattan, apart from being staged at night (Al-Qaeda don’t have Hollywood’s sense of showmanship), is of course ridiculously evocative of that day of infamy. I still remember pundits saying that exploding skyscrapers would never again be served up as light-hearted entertainment…

*Title: a line from CARRY ON SCREAMING.