Cannes Do

The Forgotten takes a fortnight’s break to allow Cannes to dominate The Daily Notebook — I ain’t fighting THAT juggernaut — so we present something a little special here this week. Scout Tafoya’s video essay on the 1968 festival, the festival that never was, is a beautiful and melancholy thing. Here it is.

Stay to the end and you’ll notice a thanks to me credit. I helped Scout source some of the movies. Every year films screen at festivals which are destined to vanish into obscurity. Some of them are even triumphs on the festival circuit before their disappearance. Cannes ’68 has a lot of those, and you’ll notice that many of them look really interesting. It would be interesting to see whether the loss of that prestigious platform caused more films to fall into oblivion than normal — I guess totting up the films we’ve heard of that were selected for Cannes in ’67, ’68 and ’69 would give a rough idea…

Reporting back from attempting to do just that, I find the results inconclusive — possibly because my filmic knowledge is so erratic. Any year with a strong showing of eastern block films would score badly, since I’m less up on that stuff, and the same would be true for India, Africa, even Japan. There’s also the fact that late sixties Euro cinema was more celebrated and widely seen that seventies stuff, so you can’t compare ’68 with ’71 and expect to learn anything certain.

To Wang Foo, Thanks for Everything

Part Five of our serial photoplay, THE TRAIL OF THE OCTOPUS — “The Eye of Satan.”

Last week, ace criminologist Carter Holmes and his possible romantic interest Ruth Stanhope were all set to plunge into a shallow river in a runaway railway carriage. This week, in the rather desultory way this serial tends to resolve things, they fail to do so: the carriage grinds to a halt, but then Carter gets shoved in the drink by a bad guy anyhow. The carriage is reconnected to the parent train and it chuffs off with Ruthie rekidnapped, while the sodden criminologist drags himself from the depths, a sorry sight.

Ruth is to be delivered into the nefarious clutches of Wang Foo, who might as well be called Hoo Hee for all I care. He’s a fake Chinese character in wax eyelids, and he seems to be a big cheese in Chinatown. What his interest is in the ceremonial daggers, the stone vault or the Egyptian figurine, I don’t know.

Much of this week’s action takes place in a San Francisco hotel — always a place redolent with adventure. There’s spying from behind newspapers, eavesdropping, and surprise encounters in corridors. A guy from episode one whom we thought was dead has turned up, though all he seems to do is stroll about, startling the supporting players.

A policeman testifies to the difficulty of making a pinch in Chinatown, owing to the fact that the whole district is undermined by tunnels so that fugitive Chinamen may burrow through the earth like rodents and thus evade capture.

An assassination is prepared by wiring a door knob to the electric power line.

Overhearing Monsieur X’s secret password, Holmes uses it and a stolen X-mask to pass himself off as the intrepid miscreant. Rather like the bit in DUCK SOUP where everybody is disguised as Groucho, this leads to confusion and intrigue. A good job none of them runs into a mirror.

Ruth engineers her own rescue by slipping the phone off the hook and declaring “The Chief of Police” — cut to switchboard operator, who smartly puts her right through to the man in charge — cut back to Ruth finishing her sentence “is a friend of mine.” In this way, her faux-riental captor thinks she’s just making conversation, rather than calling for help. She’s then able to give the cops the address she’s being kept at. It’s nice to see a smart damsel in distress for a change.

Carter Holmes jalopies over in time to save Ruth from a fat guy worse than death.

The guy everyone thought was dead disguises himself as Monsieur X also. Now there are three of them running about Frisco. Poor Ruth allows herself to be rescued by the wrong guy. Or not so much rescued, more re-abducted, or possibly just stolen, since she was already abducted to begin with. When you’re passed around as much as her, you must start to feel a little objectified.

Sent back to the same hotel Holmes is staying in, Ruth is about to fall prey to the rug merchant’s electrified knob. The excitement is unbearable!

Actor and Alien

Actor Grant Mitchell, a reliable if low-wattage character thesp in numerous Warner Brothers productions, particularly of the pre-code era, his grumpy paternalistic demeanour could be pointed at a wide variety of roles –

PREDATOR, a 1987 action movie with a vagina dentata alien in it.

The first distracting thing about Grant Mitchell is that he shares a name with a character in Eastenders. See also 1940s makeup artist Guy Pearce who always makes us think of the modern film star (and especially his lousy makeup in PROMETHEUS) and Universal music arranger Frank Skinner, who reminds Brits, rather against their will, of a comedian of the same name.

The second distracting thing about Grant Mitchell is that he looks a bit like a bulldog’s skull looking out of a potato.

The third distracting thing about Grant Mitchell is his resemblance to the Predator, although fortunately without the sexual overtones.

PREDATOR really is all about male sexual anxiety. It may be that the monster design was simply supposed to be upsetting, without any deeper psychological intent, deploying what Camille Paglia calls “displacement upwards” (she was talking about Bardot’s full sensual lips). Putting something in the wrong place can make it disturbing. But I think we’re entitled to read meaning into the decision to make the monster a castrating, fang-filled vulva. Especially with the largely male, largely musclebound cast, the sexist banter and the right-wing slant (we have to assume Arnie and his gang are Black Ops, working to overthrow a legally elected government, because that’s what secret American task forces have always done, and especially under Reagan). If it were a slightly better film, it would also be possible to appreciate the monster’s point of view more. It could play like FIRST BLOOD. As it is, I don’t sympathise with Arnie and company at all. The monster is outnumbered and on a foreign planet — sure, he chose to be there, but one has to respect his courage.

I guess if there were an early ’30s Warner version of PREDATOR, Grant Mitchell could play the monster (using a primitive version of motion capture, where the actors eyebrows are attached to a large puppet by lengths of dowling). Eugene Pallette as Arnie.