The Sunday Intertitle: Night of the Long Ears

“This is the most boring film about giant killer rabbits I’ve ever seen!” cried Fiona.

“And, at the same time, the most interesting,” I suggested.

“No,” she said, firmly.

NIGHT OF THE LEPUS — how did this happen? We had to watch, in search of clues. I formulated a half-baked idea that the novel it’s based on, The Year of the Angry Rabbit, must’ve been remarkably compelling, thus fooling a particularly gullible producer into thinking it’d make a good screen property. Throw in a batch of tainted cocaine and that almost seems plausible. But the book is a sci-fi satire, whose author, Russell Braddon, was well aware of the comic overtones of his chosen subject. Somebody involved in LEPUS — hell, everybody involved in LEPUS — has decided to play it completely straight, an incomprehensible decision.

The whole thing’s on YouTube. There are many cherishable moments, but I like this scene — a reaction to a scene of bloody horror, stylishly underplayed by actor Paul Fix at 5:20 in. I particularly like the ever-so tiny backward glance he gives the corpse — a look of… irritation. A sort of “You again?” look. Or maybe, “I was in SCARFACE, and now this?” Still, he would appear in PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID a few years later. Don’t give up, Mr Fix!

I can’t see DeForest for Ms. Leigh.

Speaking of Peckinpah, director William F. Claxton, who came from television and went straight back there (chastened, one imagines) throws in some bright crimson blood splattering, jolts rabbits around on wires to make them look like they’ve been hit by gunshots (like Elisha Cook Jnr in SHANE) and struggles manfully with the impossible job of making normal-sized rabbits, hopping cheerfully about in slomo on model sets, interact dramatically with normal-sized people, running about on location. There’s actually one ingenious solution, a POV shot looking through a miniature truck windscreen, over a miniature truck hood, at the onrushing bunny horde. (Scenes in cars constitute the film’s main source of “camera movement.”)

The ending sees the rabbit army destroyed by an electrified railway line, in a montage of positively Vertovian frenzy. The rabbits are driven onto the tracks by an array of car headlights — we all know about rabbits and headlights, yes — recruited from a drive-in (the cartoon showing is a TOM & JERRY — obviously should’ve been BUGS BUNNY but this is an MGM release, not Warners. And William Claxton’s directing, not Joe Dante)… there’s humorous potential in all of that, plus a chance for a William Castle type address to the real drive-in audience watching, but none of that gets picked up.

To call NIGHT OF THE LEPUS a missed opportunity would be… insane. But in a funny way, it is. Claxton and his writers (one of whom seemingly never worked again) missed their chance to make a knowingly ridiculous movie, and instead made an unconsciously ridiculous movie. The rabbits probably had a better idea of what was going on.

Amazing shots of frying rabbits! It’s opticals and stuffed toys, I don’t think they actually harmed any rabbits, although I’m not making any promises. This movie was originally released in odorama so the smell of singed bunny fur… no.

It even has an intertitle.

WEIRD COINCIDENCE DEPARTMENT

So, we’re watching, then I have to take a Skype call (I actually can’t tell anymore if I’m watching this stuff for pleasure or to see Randy’s expression when he calls and I tell him what’s on) and after that I check my email and a correspondent has sent me a list of DVDs for possible swapping. I notice EVERY LITTLE CROOK AND NANNY and have to look it up because although I’ve vaguely heard of it, I don’t know what it is — Lynn Redgrave comedy — I only ever heard of it via seeing it in Halliwell’s Film Guide, probably twenty years ago.

Resume movie — and on the marquee of the drive-in, the one the rabbit pack is rampaging towards, what do you think the main feature presentation is?

Up until this point, I had thought the strangest thing about the film was, you know, its subject.

Warren peace. 

David E writes, via FaceBook: Janet Leigh was asked about it once and she said “Well when I read the script it SOUNDED horrifying.” She wasn’t entirely wrong.

Night of the Lepus

Pinky on Parade

Lionel “Pinky” Atwill displays his enantiodromic approach to acting.

Interest in Thorold Dickinson seems to be on a continual rise, which is a good thing in my book. Now we have his first feature as solo director available, THE HIGH COMMAND. Produced  by Fanfare Films, a fly-by-night outfit who ceased trading after their single movie, it’s a military mystery/courtroom drama starring Lionel “Pinky” Atwill as a general with a shady past, Lucie Mannheim (THE 39 STEPS) as the rich wife of pathologically jealous Steven Geray, and a young, skinny James Mason as a dashing officer who romances her. It all comes to a head when a sleazy British military doctor is murdered, and the events take place in a West African colony on the Gold Coast.

Despite a meagre budget, Dickinson insisted on grabbing some authentic location shots, and he folds them into the studio stuff with cunning, if transparent artifice. His background as an editor reveals itself with jokey use of sound and snazzy transitions, and if the plot is a somewhat contrived affair (last-minute re-writes were required to appease the censor, who objected to anything showing British officers in a bad light), it’s consistently entertaining.

Otto (PEEPING TOM) Heller’s cinematography produces some striking moments, and even the sequence where documentary shots of a firelit native ceremony is intercut with studio closeups of the Brit stars is reasonable effective. The trouble is, of course, that the location material has unavoidable rough edges, which nobody would dream of replicating in the studio material, so a certain clash of styles is inevitable. One appreciates the effort, though, and Dickinson’s foreign travel opened his eyes to the realities of colonial life, which fed into the film’s lightly satiric attitude.

In particular, Graham Greene’s review singled out a scene where a colossal gust of wind blasts through the colonial club while the national anthem is being played, and nobody can close a window or suppress a billowing tablecloth as everybody’s too bust standing to attention. My Dad reports than in the ‘forties, during his film-going youth, the national anthem was played at the end of every programme at the local Odeon, and there’d be a stampede by the audience to get out before it started, otherwise you’d be stuck standing to attention for the full six verses. It’s fascinating: everybody knew it would be disrespectful not to stand, but it was considered perfectly respectful to elbow your way out of the auditorium at high speed to avoid standing.

These Britons are crazy.

Buy THE HIGH COMMAND here: The High Command [DVD]

Bart of Darkness

I actually read Peter Bart’s Infamous Players A Tale of Movies, The Mob (and Sex) thinking that he was Peter Biskind. Then I wrote a review on that basis, before I’d even finished the book. Then I realized that Peter Bart and Peter Biskind are two different men — they have different names, different faces, and one of them has a very different moustache. That should have tipped me off immediately.

Nevertheless, despite realizing my howling error before “going to press,” I am presenting the review unchanged, partly because “Rewriting is censorship” (the beat authors) and partly because  ”Blogging isn’t writing, it’s graffiti with punctuation” (Elliott Gould in CONTAGION) — a description I embrace with enthusiasm though I’m far from certain about the punctuation part. And also, though I fully acknowledge that Peter Bart and Peter Biskind are not the same man, on a deeper, poetic level, they actually are.

Also also, taking Bart to task for faulty fact-checking in a review where I have confused him with another, different man, makes me look like an asshole, which is good for my ego.

Also also also, this review gives you an idea of what film history looks like without any fact-checking, thus saving you the effort of reading Bart’s book.

A DECADE UNDER THE WEATHER

There’s an aphorism I can’t quite recall about returning once too often to the well, and it hangs over Peter Bart’s memoir of his days at Paramount in the 70s, Infamous Players A Tale of Movies, The Mob (and Sex). The whole thing’s pretty tired, covering ground Bart went over more entertainingly in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (“The gossip culture’s revenge on the counter-culture,” as Paul Schrader put it.)

I enjoy gossip, and enjoy hearing that talented people have feet of clay, so I gobbled up Easy Riders shamelessly. Also, I feel a debt of gratitude to Bart because as I finished the book I came down with appendicitis. I was convinced I had food poisoning and believed I’d feel better if I threw up. His description of the murder of Dorothy Stratton at the end of his book helped me to achieve a successful vomiting, allowing me to realize that the problem was elsewhere.

Peter Bart.

The problem with Infamous Players isn’t that the subject is worn out, though there are numerous books about the period (Peter Cowie’s The Godfather Book is a fun one). It’s more like Bart is worn out. And his editor isn’t helping — the Introduction states “I played an integral role in both the success and the chaos,” and then over the page, just seventeen lines later, “I was lucky to be there at a time of great achievement and great confusion, and I managed to contribute to both.”

But then, the book’s title should have warned me: the word “sex” placed in prudish/prurient parenthesis speaks of a fundamentally lousy attitude to words.

Fact-checking is also not the book’s strong point, especially when it comes to plot synopses. Bart apparently thinks the original SCARFACE was about two brothers, one a gangster and one a cop, and he describes PLAY MISTY FOR ME as dealing with a disc jockey who turns violent when a one-night stand won’t date him again.

Peter Biskind.

This is worrying, but not as much as when Bart blithely narrates a series of events and imputes a cause-and-effect relationship that makes no sense. Noting that PLAY MISTY was a box office disappointment, he suggests that Clint Eastwood “wanted the assurance of having his alter ego, Don Siegel, serve as director” on DIRTY HARRY — but in the next sentence he observes that HARRY was released a mere two months after MISTY, which of course means that the earlier film’s box office performance could have played no possible role in Eastwood’s choice of Siegel as director on his next film. If I can catch Bart out like this, it makes me concerned that other stories he tells may be similarly inaccurate, and I won’t have any way of knowing.

Next to this, the disappointing lack of period ambience is a minor quibble. Robert Evans’ The Kid Stays in the Picture struck me as probably a lattice of self-serving lies, but it reeked of the seventies, because Evans is kind of still in that zone, mentally. You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again likewise benefitted from a strong, albeit vindictive and paranoid, authorial voice. Easy Riders caught a lot of the flavour of the times too, since it was largely an oral history, but this book comes straight from Bart’s defective memories, and its language is pure 21st century journalese, apart from the entertaining moment when Bart gets a makeover to transform from tweedy reporter to hip movie exec: the black amazon saleslady who outfits him is pure Pam Grier. Which is fine: she probably was, and if she wasn’t, this is an improvement.

Frustratingly, Bart portrays himself as pretty square, pretty decent, distancing himself from all of the free love, commercial love, shady mob activity and most of the recreational drug use surrounding him. He’s like Henry Hill in GOODFELLAS, copping to being in the room when a lot of heinous shit went down, but never actually pulling the trigger himself. And of course that may well have been the case. By pointing out Paramount’s ties to the underworld, though, he does weaken his friend Robert Evans’ already unconvincing argument that he was unaware that two of his backers on THE COTTON CLUB were gangsters: it seems Evans has viewed gangsterism as a kind of aphrodisiac for as long as he’s been in business.

Of course, I’m devouring the book as shamelessly as I did its superior predecessors, on a break from Ulysses, which is going to take me a decade to finish at this rate.

***

Bart’s book took me two days. In your face, James Joyce!

Peter Bogdanovich.