The Sunday Intertitle: B&W?

The gigantic Animated Soviet Propaganda box set is really worth a look, if you have the means. Amazing design sense and a variety of styles, plus a variety of didactic approaches. While some of the anti-western satire is easy to dismiss, knowing what we do about life in the USSR, a few of the films hit home hard. The 1933 short BLACK AND WHITE deals with race in America, and its salvoes basically hit the mark: all achieved without words and pretty much without intertitles, save for the above animated question mark which morphs into an imprisoning knot, and the inscription “Lenin,” offered up at the end as a kind of panacea to the problems we’ve just seen. Paul Robeson must have liked this.

Particularly chilling is the white boss’s drive into town along a SPARTACUS-type highway of hanged black men, while a lynched figurine jiggles against his back windscreen. And the film’s rhetorical connection of the state’s electric chair to the lynch mob’s noose, as well as the not-too-subtle connection drawn between the overseer with the whip and the priest with the cross, seem, you know, basically TRUE to me.

Available from Amazon:

Animated Soviet Propaganda: From the October Revolution to Perestroika (4 DVD Set)

Pants From Space

“How would you feel if someone with a crazy helmet with pipes sticking out of it came at you in the dark?”

I watched PHANTOM FROM SPACE with the usual excuse: it’s depicted in Denis Gifford’s horror movie book. A still shows a muscleman with a big bald dome, wearing jockey shorts and raising his arms in a lackadaisical mime of threat. Since he’s obviously standing quite still, at some distance from anybody else, the raised hands fail to terrify. It looks like he’s been the victim of a stick-up, and his clothes have been stolen.

Grabbing a copy of the film, I watched to the end without having actually researched who made it. It’s obviously a cheapie independent job, as Gifford notes. Then the credits appear: “Produced and Directed by W. Lee Wilder.” It’s like the funeral at the end of DON’T LOOK NOW where everything we’ve seen suddenly makes sense. The am-dram acting, the cheap-ass FX work, the static camerawork (our space-suit monster is seen almost exclusively in extreme long shot, a shiny dot): all of these cease to be puzzling aberrations and become at once the signature of an auteur with a consistent stylistic approach. Consistently poor.

Actually, as noted here, Wilder’s noirs are a good bit better than his sci-fi/horror work, and even in that genre he’s surprisingly variable. THE MAN WITHOUT A BODY is consistently hilarious, whereas THE SNOW CREATURE is so dull, if you start watching it at 7 O’clock, by 7.05 you’re wishing it had ended at 6.30. KILLERS FROM SPACE is uninteresting apart from a psychedelic sequence in a cave full of enlarged bugs, which goes on so long and so plotlessly that a kind of narcoleptic fascination sets in.

This one starts with so much stock footage that for minutes on end it seems like Wilder has succeeded where Ed Wood failed, in his mad dream to make a film without any original film. But then the shots of whirling radar dishes run out, as they must in any film (I like the huge variety and impressive size of outmoded radar equipment, I really get a kick out of it, but every film it features in seems to be lousy, even if it’s by Anthony Mann) and actors start acting, and the level of conviction plummets faster than the Phantom’s UFO (a glowing dot which looks like it’s en route to a yet-to-be-invented game of Pong).

Crashed UFO causes TV interference. Govt. mobile detector units (station wagons with big aerials) try to track down the static. For the only time in the movie, Wilder attempts actual cinematic technique, shooting the cars with Dutch tilts. It merely looks like they’re parked on steep hills.

Soon the source of interference has committed two murders, and police are baffled. They remain baffled throughout the film, and so does everybody else, except when they’re making gigantic and unjustified leaps of reasoning which always prove correct: that’s the only way the writers can get any exposition into this stalled torso of a flick. Ah, the writers: one is Myles Wilder, the director’s son. So Billy Wilder’s idiot brother is joined by an idiot nephew…

An interesting familial resemblance: Billy Wilder was a no-nonsense liberal, by and large, and maybe his brother was too: unlike in most spaceman movies of the era, our invader is benign, just looking for help with his faulty technology. He only hurts the panicky macho types who attack him first. And the humans eventually recognize this and try to help him out. It’s vaguely sweet.

Asides from this refreshing deviation from the red scare psychology informing most ’50s B-movie sci-fi, the film is undramatic and inefficient. Once he removes his boiler suit, the extraterrestrial is invisible, which gives us more opportunity to admire the cheap sets and actors positioned behind him. The action shifts to Griffith Observatory, but Wilder forgets to film the famous dome in his establishing shots, so what we see is just a bland, boxy structure, like all the buildings and most of the thesps in the movie. This is a director who moved from manufacturing handbags to making movies. If this one is anything to go by, I bet the handles came off his bags before you got them home.

(Griffith Observatory is in so many movies one wonders how they ever got any observing done. They seem to have been busy stargazing at James Dean and Natalie Wood rather than at the quasars and novas that should rightly make up their bread and butter.)

Finally the alien is exposed by ultraviolet light, lips working silently. Only the dog can hear him! This muscular fellow has an incredibly high-pitched voice, like Treat Williams in THE RITZ. And it seems the movie still of the Phantom in boxers in Gifford’s Pictorial History is not an accurate representation of the film’s contents, since this Phantom is NUDE. And then he drops dead, of his own accord.

“So he came here, wherever from,” say the film’s wise prof (who counsels non-violence and is RIGHT and they actually LISTEN to him!), “and right before our eyes, his body went through the final phases of life.” Nobody has anything to say in reply to that, so the film stops.

College is ending for the summer, so in theory I have a bit more mental energy, so next week I swear to watch some more dignified arthouse type films and write about them. Class this place up a bit.

Skelton in the Closet

I’m very glad I looked more closely at Roy William Neill’s work, because during this last hectic yet sedentary week of marking student’s films (and production files, screenplays etc), I barely had the energy to watch any movies at all. But Neill’s SHERLOCK HOLMES movies (he made eleven of them) are perfect entertainments for the tired academic — short (usually just over an hour), funny, atmospheric, and plotty without being too demanding. And the warmth of entering a cosy B-movie world peopled by familiar and loved character actors is not to be underestimated. Besides these restful merits, the films are stylish and witty, and managed the difficult (and somewhat unwise) task of removing Homes and Watson from their Victorian roots and planting them in WWII era settings, the better to shoehorn in propaganda messages, sometimes as overt as direct quotes from Churchill. Despite this potentially damaging decision, under Neill’s production and direction, the movies are thickly foggy, shadowy and authentic to the spirit of their source material.

Does anybody have a good source of info on Neill? What’s available online is patchy but intriguing. We learn that he was the Holmes expert on-set, deferred to by Basil Rathbone, who called him “dear Mousey.” He was born on a ship off the coast of Ireland. His father was captain. He died while visiting relatives in England, just after finishing the last Rathbone-Bruce Holmes movie, and the excellent Cornell Woolrich adaptation BLACK ANGEL. His was a Hollywood career, but he had returned to the UK to make DOCTOR SYN, with George Arliss, and nearly directed what ended up as Hitchcock’s THE LADY VANISHES. His Holmes films benefit from a strong sense of Britishness, and in particular, oddly enough, Scottishness.

The Phantom! In THE SCARLET CLAW.

These “English relatives” fascinate me, because Neill is a Celtic name, suggesting Irish or Scottish roots, and Neill’s Holmes movies are peppered with Scottish characters and situations. In PASSAGE TO ALGIERS, Holmes and Watson are planning a Scottish fishing holiday. In THE SPIDER WOMAN they actually manage it, at the start of the movie. TERROR BY NIGHT takes place on the London to Edinburgh train, and HOUSE OF FEAR plays in a remote Scottish village, and amid the extensive cast there isn’t a single embarrassingly fake accent. THE SCARLET CLAW is set in Canada, where we naturally run into a couple of Scotsmen, including David Clyde, brother of silent comedian Andy. And every other film seems peppered with Scots cameos, from reliable bit-player Alec Craig, and series regular Mary Gordon as Mrs Hudson. Nigel Bruce himself, of course, was descended from Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland.

All of this could simply be in homage to Edinburgh-born Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle. But such a tribute seems unlikely unless Doyle’s origins had some personal meaning to Neill, so I’m holding out for a Scottish connection until proven wrong.

Here’s Skelton Knaggs in TERROR BY NIGHT, as a Scottish hitman, a role he luxuriates in obscenely, coming across like a depraved rentboy from Kelvinbridge.