Crazy Talk

I actually got to meet Youki Kudoh, co-star of this week’s edition of The Forgotten (Sogo Ishii’s hysterical-in-every-sense comedy THE CRAZY FAMILY) at the Puchin Film Festival. She made her debut for Ishii, but may be know to more of you for her role as a Japanese sightseer in Memphis in Jim Jarmusch’s charming MYSTERY TRAIN, or for her role in Takashi Miike’s not quite so charming episode of Masters of Horror, IMPRINT. Or for a number of other movies.

I actually took her picture at the time, but I have no idea what happened to it. Too bad.

A Japanese friend told me Youki Kudoh is kind of a modest cult actor rather than a big star in Japan because her face isn’t considered pretty enough, her features are too big. It seems she’s regarded as a kind of Frank Moran figure. Crazy indeed. Fortunately, she speaks fluent English — and Swedish — and so darts about the world, illuminating it.

Catch the Pidgeon

Fritz Lang’s MAN HUNT gets the Limerwrecks treatment, by a number of ink-stained wretches incluing myself, but also Hilary “Surly Hack” Barta — here, here and here.

Emordnilap

EMORDNILAP is PALINDROME backwards, you see.

A palindrome isn’t, as one might assume, a nightmarish gladiatorial arena where unfortunate enemies of the state are thrown to a ravening Sarah Palin to be disemboweled in her slavering jaws. So we can relax. It’s merely a word that reads the same backwards as forwards. But it does, like many words with terribly precise meanings, get mushed around to merely mean “a backwards spelled word”.

Which leads me to director Reginald LeBorg, who helmed the above short subject. Poor Reggie was probably the least talented Viennese director in Hollywood, outclassed as he was by Lang, Wilder, Zinnemann… He may have been the least talented Viennese PERSON in Hollywood. When Duvivier’s compendium film FLESH AND FANTASY got chopped up, a spare episode was selected for expansion into feature form, and LeBorg got the job of shooting the added scenes for what became DESTINY. Given that he had a fraction of Duvivier’s vast budget, and a script that threw in three completely new and irrelevant opening sequences to pad things out, I guess he was seriously disadvantaged from the start, but let’s just say that the seams show…

But my point is, LeBorg was born Reginald Grobel. GROBEL. LEBORG. Think about it.

As for Yvonne DeCarlo, famed as she later would be for her Sondheim work, she didn’t seem to get much chance to sing in the Hollywood movies I’ve encountered her in, most notably CRISS CROSS (though she does essay a memorable mambo with Tony Curtis in that). So it’s nice to see her giving those lungs a work-out here.