Baker’s Inferno

I keep forgetting that the venerable Roy Ward Baker, director of A NIGHT TO REMEMBER and QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, among many others, had a pretty successful innings in Hollywood. DON’T BOTHER TO KNOCK starred Richard Widmark and the young Marilyn Monroe, and is pretty good, even though MM’s performance has come in for a lot of criticism. It’s a rare psychodrama where the deranged threat is also treated with sympathy as a character, and allowed to survive the end credits. And I just obtained NIGHT WITHOUT SLEEP, a noirish number with Linda Darnell.

INFERNO, filmed in eye-jabbing 3D, is also somewhat in a noir vein, starring as it does Robert Ryan (who could just about single-handedly wrench any movie into noir terrain) as a misanthropic millionaire (another Howard Hughes variant, like his turn in CAUGHT — he even gets injured and stuck in the wilderness like Hughes in the much later MELVIN AND HOWARD) with a scheming wife, Rhonda Fleming. She and her lover, William Lundigan (reliable movie ballast) mislead the rescue party to search the wrong area, in hopes that the broken-legged hubby will perish under the blazing sun.

So it’s a tale of survival, with Ryan building a splint, assembling a rope to get himself off a mountain, hunting for supper and looking for water in all the wrong places. And as such it’s reasonably compelling. The increasingly grizzled Ryan monologues internally to himself, keeping himself alive by plotting his revenge, until he finally comes to something resembling peace of mind and physical safety.

The 3D disappoints somewhat, mainly because the desert isn’t such a promising location for dimensional hi-jinks: there’s no middle-ground to add depth. Ryan’s lonely stumbling takes place against an infinity of distant sky and sand, with his pop-up figure the only point of interest. His crawl down the mountain should have offered opportunities for vertiginous thrills, but these seem to slip away: a POV looking downwards has no sense of scale, and could have been taken from the top of a hillock; most of the shots of Ryan pose him against the rockface, a flat background only inches behind him.

But I shouldn’t be too hard on the movie, since the copy I was working from was pretty sub-par. For one thing, the red and blue images were slightly out of synch, probably by two frames, causing a dark blink whenever there was a cut, and causing migrainy haloing of characters in motion, as if they’d stepped out of an old four-colour comic book printed out of register. So it’s fair to say nothing looked its best.

Nevertheless, with Ryan’s towering presence and such a compelling plot engine, the film entertains, and the final brawl in a confined cabin was terrific: as the room catches fire, illustrating the title in a new way, Baker throws furniture, lanterns, broken jugs,  Lundigan and blazing ceiling beams in our faces so fast we come away feeling bruised. Two-fisted anaglyph action!

Big Top Pee-yew

GORILLA AT LARGE should really have been called GORILLA IN DEPTH, shouldn’t it, to capitalise on the whole 3D thing. Except really it ought to have been called CIRCUS OF ASSHOLES, since everybody in the movie, near enough, is some variety of jerk, blowhard or swine. I’m suspicious of movies that fail to provide any interesting sympathetic characters, because it tends to suggest a filmmaker with an unappealing approach to life. The crowd of gits in front of the camera is standing in for one big git behind it.

Now, casting your eye over the subject and talent here, one would imagine that the real 3D attraction would be Raymond Burr, wouldn’t you? The prospect of his massive form heaving itself towards you in 3D is an irresistible one, isn’t it? Yet, due perhaps to director Harmon Jones’s lack of interest in, well, the film, Burr’s bulk never gets to loom in a Hank Quinlan manner, thereby allowing us to watch the movie as if through the watery eyes of a cowering twink.* A missed opportunity. Perhaps Raymond is more suited to widescreen, anyway.

Passing swiftly over Cameron Mitchell  – Me, watching WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS: “The bad gargantua looks like Cameron Mitchell. Fiona: “What does Cameron Mitchell look like?” Me: [points at gargantua] — we come to Anne Bancroft, and here we stop for a while. Although screenwriters Praskins and Slater, like the director, stopping off briefly at the movies en route to episodic TV purgatory, see fit to write Bancroft as a cheating sexpot, she still commands audience respect with her awesomeness. Rather than play for our sympathy, she just relishes her hotness, and walks off with those parts of the movie not pinned to the floor by Burr. And since her cheating tart character is cheating on Raymond, we can kind of see where she’s coming from.

But the actual element of the movie that justifies the 3D is none of these, and no, it’s not the gorilla, swing as he may into the camera with a permanent neutral expression on his ersatz face, nor even is it Lee Marvin as a skinny cop, making faces through the bars before being ape-chopped to the ground, nor is it Lee J Cobb, proof that one bulky man with a cigar is not enough for a movie as brashly obnoxious as this. The star effect of the film appears when they blast fireworks at the escaped ape. The fireworks themselves are nothing much, but the smoke trails they leave drifting in the extreme foreground are really nice.

*Have absolutely no knowledge of Burr’s bedroom activities and the above is sheer lurid imagining.

Red Rock West

Glasses on!

Celebrating the release of Joe Dante’s THE HOLE with a couple of choice 3D movies!

TAZA, SON OF COCHISE is one of the most interesting-sounding 3D movies of the 50s, since it’s directed by Douglas Sirk and photographed in colour by Russell Metty (maybe the greatest cameraman to use the process back then). I never thought I’d find a copy in anaglyph 3D… but then I did! And it was worth it.

“You remember, it was a time of a certain technical revolution, the wide screen, etc. Ultimately, the exhibitors didn’t like it, so it was scrapped. But it was no help to me.” ~ from Sirk on Sirk, Conversations with Jom Halliday.

Despite Sirk’s professed lack of enthusiasm, he stuffs every frame with dimensional interest, achieving numerous subtly impressive effects, always decorating the Utah landscape with foreground action, and taking care to use scenery which offers different plains of interest, from distant buttes to looming branches. As in IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, the best effects are achieved with scenery sloping up or down into the distance. I could hardly be bothered following the story, I was so entranced by the embracing diorama.

Watch out for that rock, Rock!

Of course, there are more vulgar pleasures. Somebody obviously thought having Rock Hudson topless for half a movie was a fabulous idea, and I’m not going to say they were wrong. Stuff gets thrown at the camera, but not too frequently. Generally, the best thing about the process is the you-are-thereness it imparts to the traditional John Ford environment.