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.

Film Directors with Their Shirts Off and Trousers Down

“George Raft never took his clothes off.”

Mark Rydell (far right) strips in Robert Altman’s THE LONG GOODBYE, doing pre-emptive penance to Elliott Gould (second right) for directing him in HARRY AND WALTER GO TO NEW YORK.

It’s worth watching young Arnie Schwartzenegger (second left, with bum-fluff moustache) in this scene — while the other thugs register surprise and reluctance at being ordered to denude by their boss, Ahnoldt can’t wait — he’s eager to go, unbuttoning almost before the words are out of Rydell’s mouth — it’s what he took the job for in the first place. Be a gangster’s bodyguard and expose your pecs.

I’m just reading some early Raymond Chandler stories (and Fiona is reading Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest — it’s a hardboiled household). I really feel that Pearls are a Nuisance ought to be a Major Motion Picture, possibly by the Coen Brothers, possibly starring Armie Hammer. There’s some comic dialogue in there worthy of Sturges.

“Drunk, Walter?” he boomed. “Did I hear you say drunk? An Eichelberger drunk? Listen, son. We ain’t got a lot of time now. It would take maybe three months. Some day when you got three months and maybe five thousand gallons of whiskey and a funnel, I would be glad to take my own time and show you what an Eichelberger looks like when drunk. You wouldn’t believe it. Son, there wouldn’t be nothing of this town but a few sprung girders and a lot of busted bricks, in the middle of which–Geez, I’ll get talking English myself if I hang around you much longer–in the middle of which, peaceful, with no human life nearer than maybe fifty miles. Henry Eichelberger will be on his back smiling at the sun. Drunk, Walter. Not stinking drunk, not even country-club drunk. But you could use the word drunk and I wouldn’t take no offense.”

Via La Faustin — an image which gives the lie to Gould’s too-hasty statement — George Raft with his clothes off. Source?

The Sunday Intertitle: Eventide

Concluding out short series of silent Italian epics with the mother of them all, CABIRIA.

“It had everything but a plot.” ~ camera assistant Karl Brown’s double-edged review isn’t quite accurate: Gabriele D’Annunzio and Giovanni Pastrone’s script fairly creaks with plot, but it lacks an obvious throughline, since the plight of Cabiria, separated from her rich Roman parents, isn’t the central focus of all the action, and we keep switching to new characters whose importance hasn’t been established. The bit everybody remembers, Cabiria’s rescue by muscleman Maciste from sacrifice to a pagan god, occurs about an hour in and is followed by a whole bunch of new characters appearing and wresting the storyline right off the tracks.

Meanwhile ~ which intertitle do you prefer? I have to deplore the tendency to throw away beautiful old intertitles like the one at top, while adding bland and anachronistic-looking translations. Is subtitling that difficult? The marvelous hand-crafted titles of CABIRIA are part of its overall design. And good design is particularly important here since D’Annunzio’s titles are so damn wordy.

The design also includes things like the spectacular (and uncredited) sets, which inspired Griffith’s INTOLERANCE and its Hollywood Babylon, the special effects by Eugenio Bava (Mario’s dad), including a furiously erupting Mt. Etna, and the gliding camerawork, made possible by Segundo de Chomon’s custom-built dolly, the first of its kind.

The previous Italian super-productions we’ve examined have been both much shorter and much more static, from a camera placement point of view. THE FALL OF TROY provides us with a slow pan, sweeping this way and that to more-or-less follow the action, but Pastrone here attempts something quite new. The purpose of his tracking shots was to explore the sets, which were so big they utterly dwarfed the actors. If you began with an establishing shot, the human figures were practically dots, but a shot framed for the cast would exclude the magnificent backdrops. Pastrone’s goal was to somehow combine an extreme long shot with a more conventional head-to-toe framing (he rarely goes as close as a medium shot).

The effect of the moves is interesting. The settings come alive as three-dimensional constructions (no matte paintings here, just the occasional volcanic miniature) which we can move through, almost like players in a big vidgame. Dramatically, on the other hand, the slow steady drift inwards at the start of almost every scene/shot, and the rhyming drift out at the end, have a slightly flattening effect, making everything seem calm and stately. Even though the plot is three hours of war, torture (much of it censored in most extant copies) and frenetic running around, the mood conjured by Chomon’s steady trundle is one of tranquility.

It was a lesson learned by Griffith, whose chase scenes had often been followed by a car-mounted camera as breathless as the action. Perhaps the Italians didn’t notice that this had the effect of intensifying the mood, since the primary aim was obviously to simply keep the subjects in frame as they motored along. When Griffith made his own ancient world epic, with elephant statues cribbed from Pastrone, he shot Belshazzar’s feast celebrations with two cameras mounted on an elevator, mounted on a track. This prototype of the camera crane allowed him to move in on a single figure amid the cavorting multitude, while dropping from a bird’s eye perspective to one of human level. And the effect has sweep and grandeur, perfectly matched to the emotional mood of the scene.

Nevertheless, CABIRIA was there first, and there’s something interesting and soothing about the way the camera movement reduces the sense of danger that the rest of the film is working to attain. It’s a little like being thrust into CONAN THE BARBARIAN after necking a 10 mg of valium.* And this leads to me to a couple of sweeping generalizations: while American films moved the camera to follow the action and European ones used it to explore space, American films used the emotional power of the movement to emphasize the mood of the scene, while European ones used it to complicate, to add something new. But don’t take that idea too seriously!

*Maciste is at one point tethered to a giant millstone, just like Arnie in the John Milius loincloth extravaganza.