Graham Crowden, 1922-2010

That’s Graham Crowden in my film of Robert Louis Stevenson’s THE ISLE OF VOICES. He was 72, I was 27. Just heard from my writer friend Colin McLaren, screenwriter of DONKEYS, co-author of CRY FO BOBO, and author of another short film, FANTOOSH, which starred the Great Man, that Graham is no longer among us.

My fondest memory of that shoot is doing an insert shot of Graham picking up a seashell. “Just need a bit of hand acting here, Graham,” I said. He grinned that grin. “Oh, I’m very good at that!” And we carried on that exchange whenever there was an insert shot, or a shot of his back.

I introduced Graham’s sorceror character with three shots, going closer, then closer — a device nicked from James Whale’s presentation of the Frankenstein monster.

He was a lovely man, a true eccentric, a genuinely theatrical figure. Honour him by running IF…, O LUCKY MAN!, or BRITANNIA HOSPITAL, in each of which he’s sublime. “Do you have an opinion???”

The Rock

I have self-satisfaction coming out of my ears. Yes, as I peruse my brand-new, still-warm edition of the Masters of Cinema BluRay of WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER?, an emotion akin to third-degree smugness creeps from the dank recesses of my id and leaves complacent footsteps all over my ego and superego. The reason being the three — count ‘em! — three “essays” crammed into the compact accompanying booklet, each of them authored — personally — by my brain and forelimbs.

That’s not the primary reason to buy the thing, though — you should buy it for the movie itself, a crackerjack box of visual gags, satirical sideswipes and exuberant, nimble comic performances (Randall! Mansfield! Blondell!) and Gorgeous Life-like Color by Deluxe! After watching the thing, my eyeballs feel like they should be sealed in a  lead-lined box for a thousand years before it’s safe for them to look at anyone again. That thing has the platonic ideal of all your basic colours, with the brightness turned up to eleventeen.

You also get a video intro by arch-Tashlinite Joe Dante, the trailer, a Mansfield newsreel, and an alternative audio track, and a text interview with legend Tony Randall, conducted by Ethan DeSeife.

Just watched my copy, and Fiona and I were oohing and aahing at the colours like early cinemagoers experiencing projected images for the first time. An observation from Fiona I wish I’d been able to include in my essay: when Betsy Drake goes Mansfield-mad and starts making that high-pictched EEEOOH! noise associate with J.M., it’s as disturbing as Mercedes McCambridge’s revoicing of Linda Blair in THE EXORCIST. Tashlin’s comedy hovers near the boundaries of nightmare.

In stores October 25th — buy it now via my link and make me slightly more financially secure –

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? [Masters of Cinema] [Blu-ray]

Fatheads

The twin attractions of Erle C. Kenton’s GUILTY AS HELL (great pre-code title) are not really leading men Victor McLaglen (a side of mutton dotted with sharp little teeth in permanent death-rictus) and Edmund Lowe (jocular ex-matinee idol going to seed, and fast), it’s [1] the outrageous bad taste, which is at times genuinely foul, reminding us that the liberty of the pre-code era could be used in both good and bad ways, and [2] Kenton’s ridiculously pugnacious camerawork, which delights in thrusting faces and fingers into the lens in giant macro-close-up, or gliding through walls and between scenes as if the whole film were taking place on a series of closely-crammed sets. Which it is.

Movie begins with an elaborately staged murder, with Claire Dodd miscast as the corpse. Kenton pulls out all the stops like a ’30s American Argento ~

Fast-talking reporter Lowe explodes into the cop shop, where flatfoots sit around idly, listening to the radio. “Say, how much would you guys charge to haunt a house?” Then he exchanges wisecracks, insults, and out-and-out abuse with detective McLaglen. The partnership is much like McLaglen and Oakie in MURDER AT THE VANITIES: brassy, vulgar and stoopid. And yet they love each other.

Called to the murder scene, the police and press set out competing as to how outrageously they can disrespect the dead, insult the witnesses and pillage the crime scene. One cop raids the refrigerator, while Lowe pockets the photographs of the victim. Then he taps cigarette ash on the corpse. McLaglen tosses a scrunched-up gum wrapper at the corpse. “Bullseye.” Great character actress Elizabeth Patterson quite rightly expresses horror at these outrages, and we’re meant to be amused.

The movie never quite recovers from making its stars so hateful in the first minutes of the story, but things pick up when the putative good guys have to save an innocent man from death row (Richard Arlen, who always seems to be an innocent man on death row). They’re kind of obliged, y’see, since they put him there. The resulting confrontations see Kenton rehearsing for the 3D movie he’d never make ~

People sit up or step forward into leering, porous close-up, then jab their stubby digits in our eyes, giving the focus-puller repetitive strain injury. Fun stuff, if cartoony.

Result: Arlen the perpetual patsy is freed, the real killer snuffs it, and Lowe sits on his corpse. The End.