Cracking Cheese

No, not the Fritz Lang movie.

This CLASH BY NIGHT is a British “B” picture from 1964. And by “B” I really mean “W”, or possibly “Y”.

I didn’t get much out of it except enjoying greatly the above shot, from right at the beginning. The guy in the foreground has just lost a heap of money on a dog race. The guy on the right is Stanley Meadows, playing a gangster here just as he did in Cammell and Roeg’s seminal PERFORMANCE six years later. And he’s equally impressive here — a cool, crisp, naturally frightening actor who was terribly underused by British cinema. Plus he looks great in motorcycle goggles (his cunning disguise).

And I loved this shot — Peter Sallis (Wallace from WALLACE AND GROMIT) in the role of halfwitted lunatic “Victor Lush”, threatens everybody with a lit match in a paraffin-soaked barn.

That’s basically the plot — a coach full of of prisoners and their guards are imprisoned in said barn while a gang boss makes his getaway. Since all the jailbirds are required to do is sit put until dawn, there’s not much suspense - -except that it’s Guy Fawkes’ Night and fireworks are flying hither and yon.

The transporter full of hardened stereotypes put me in mind of CON AIR, and made me wonder if there’s another variation to be pulled on this appealing set-up. Apart from that, the film boasts an appearance by what appears to be future cheesemeister Ray Austen (VIRGIN WITCH) as the world’s most inept sexual predator. “My husband will be home shortly,” says Jennifer Jayne, whereupon he rips her blouse and is promptly socked to death by the returning hubby. Which is all just by way of illustrating that our appallingly stiff middle-class hero is AN INNOCENT MAN UNJUSTLY CONVICTED. Which turns out to have no bearing on anything, really.

CLASH BY NIGHT has an ability to just barely hold the attention by delivering unnecessary flashbacks, improbable coincidences, pathetic cop-outs and other narrative blunders at a rapid-fire pace. If it were any better it wouldn’t really be any fun. Sadly, the only major character who DOESN’T get a flashback is the religious zealot who’s been arrested for “trying to take brotherly love a bit too far.” Even in the wake of VICTIM (1961) this film didn’t feel able to go any deeper into THAT. Given the portrayal of Sallis’ character – is he insane? Is he mentally handicapped? Do they know there’s a difference? – it’s unlikely the results would have been terribly illuminating.

Oh, and there’s some quite fun X-rated cursing, or “pervasive language” as the MPAA would say. The actors can barely conceal their glee at being allowed to say big grown-up words like “bastard”. My Dad once told me that he and his friends used to read Mickey Spillane “for the swearing”, so they’d have dug this.

Shadowplay Swordplay

Back in December, I wrote very briefly about the opening scene of Masaki Kobayashi’s SAMURAI REBELLION, which I’d sneaked a peak at.

Well, rather belatedly, we finally watched the whole thing.

Fiona: “He’s one of my favourite filmmakers.”

Me: “You’ve seen TWO of his films. And five minutes of this one.”

Fiona: “Yeah.”

I knew just what she meant. Fiona is a huge fan of KWAIDAN (which should really be kaidan — Kobayashi’s films have suffered considerable retitling in the west). I admire it enormously — it’s as beautiful a film as was ever shot and designed — but I don’t find it too dramatically compelling or scary. But I was utterly wowed by SEPPUKU (which Criterion have decided to call HARA KIRI), an excoriating attack on the samurai ethos, and what feels like an incredibly bold film to have come from a film culture like Japan’s. Reading up on how the young Kobayashi did his best to resist his nation’s plunge into militarism in WWII deepened my respect and understanding for him. He’s somebody whose life story really feeds into and illuminates his work.

SAMURAI REBELLION (Jôi-uchi: Hairyô tsuma shimatsu — I don’t know what that means but I doubt it’s been translated literally, and the IMDb lists several alternative English titles) is a Kobayashi from 1967 that confirms the man’s mission: to tell the stories history has omitted to record. In this and SEPPUKU, Kobayashi makes a point of telling us that his characters will be not only defeated but erased from the record. We will inherit the myth of the honourable samurai code simply because all other stories have been bloodily suppressed.

This movie’s ending isn’t quite such a spectacular downer as the earlier film’s, which in a way makes it seem a lesser work. But neither film is actually depressing, despite the bleakness of their message and the violence of their action. Kobayashi’s style is hard, beautiful and incisive, using strikingly modern sharp push-in movements on his characters, Langian cutting to illustrate the cause-and-effect unfolding of the plot, and sometimes wild flourishes like theatrical lighting changes, freeze-frames and jump-cuts. Conversations between sitting or kneeling characters on the floor, an essential feature of Japanese period drama, have unique edge and ZING in Kobayashi’s work, as he holds his edits back until they really count. The intensity and grace of the technique prevents the film from becoming depressing, in the same way Shakespeare’s poetry prevents his tragedies from ever acquiring a deadening gloom (unless Peter Brook is on hand to steamroller them into submission).

The plots of these Samurai tragedies are genuinely Shakespearian, it seems to me. They also relate to the classic western. Unlike any modern action movie, both films build to an inevitable outburst of violent conflict, but tend to avoid decorating the path with action set-pieces. You have to wait for that promised samurai rebellion. While it’s hard to envisage a pacifist action film, what Kobayashi does with his stories almost amounts to that: as he slowly builds the sense of injustice, tension rises to the point where violence comes to seem essential, the only human response to the oppression on view. And at the same time, the violence harms only the underlings and the innocents: in the long term, it achieves nothing, and is destined not even to be remembered.

With Toshiro Mifune AND Tetsuyo Nakadai, the film has plenty of iconic honourable bloodshed stature, but at the same time undercuts its genre superbly, making it simultaneously a samurai film for those who don’t like samurai films, and one for those who do.

*

Surprisingly, script collaborator Shinobu Hashimoto also worked with Kurosawa on projects such as THE SEVEN SAMURAI which, though they include some knocking of the samurai myth, ultimately reinforce it.

*

There doesn’t seem to be any more Kobayashi available in the west for us to groove to. Criterion’s imprint of his epic three-parter THE HUMAN CONDITION is out of print and retails for exhorbitant prices second-hand. If anybody wants to burn me a copy I will love them madly.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

 

…which brings us back to Fritz Lang. Yes, our Waltz of the Eye Patches concludes with the monocled maestro himself, who suffered an eye injury as a cavalry officer in the Great War, necessitating the monocle which became a symbol of his dictatorial, “Prussian” style of directing in Hollywood. But in later life he suffered from progressive deterioration in the other eye, bringing on the eye-patch years — his bad eye became his good eye, and he now wore both monocle and patch — the belt-and-braces approach to being a crazy film director.

I do cherish Lotte Eisner’s story about trying to introduce Lang and Bunuel, but failing because Lang was to short-sighted to recognise Bunuel and Bunuel was too deaf to hear Eisner. Human frailty is a great subject for art and anecdote.

I also admire, in a strange way, the contrasting approaches to cigarette smoking shown in the archival interview clips of Lang and Nick Ray in A PERSONAL JOURNEY WITH MARTIN SCORSESE THROUGH AMERICAN FILMS.

Lang, minus his usual long cigarette holder (possibly his lungs by now were too swampy to get the smoke up the tube) clutches his ciggie Alec Guinness-style between the second and third fingers of his flat hand, and sucks eagerly on it mid-phrase, as if unable to make it to the end of a clause without another wheezing puff of the life-giving cancer.

Ray lets his cigarette hang from his lip, paper grafted to dry skin, bobbing like a sprinter’s erection as he mumbles away, ignoring the clinging coffin nail and only managing to inhale what drifts his way through natural air circulation, passively smoking his own cigarette.

Ray, I forgot to mention earlier, is the only one of the five canonical patch-wearers to have suffered injury to the eyeball in the line of duty, apparently bursting a blood vessel due to the stress of making WE CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN, his final film.

My only other eye-patch-related story concerns another Edinburgh Film Festival, the year of VELVET GOLDMINE as opening film. A perfect film to theme a party around, which may have more to do with opening and closing film selections than anything else, but nobody much minded this choice, especially with Todd Haynes in attendance. (Actually, it’s one of his lesser films, with a half-hearted engagement with narrative but a great deal of visual and aural pleasure to compensate.) Festival director Lizzie Francke wore an eye-patch through the entire two weeks, as a result of a tragic glitter accident during her party preparations. Still, it was another injury in the line of duty, and an eye-patch does in fact make an excellent glam rock accessory.

A patchy chief

Boy, Ford sure had the sloppiest eyepatch.  Even I could tell you it’d look better UNDER the spectacles. Better yet, get a Fritz Lang monocle. Walsh’s eyepatch, covering a big sticking plaster, is kind of gross, but then, Walsh didn’t have an eye.

Walsh was injured when a jackrabbit came through the windscreen of his car. The doctors told him the eye had best come out: “They said it was a mush eye.”

Ford once grumbled to Walsh that his eye was bothering him.

“At least you’ve got an eye.”

Walsh then offered to remove the offending Ford eye with a nearby piece of cutlery if that would help, and Ford got in a huff about the whole thing.

Ottocracy

 

Otto weekend has spilled out into the week and looks like swamping it altogether! What is it with Shadowplay and these unpleasant Viennese? First Fritz Lang (above) rampages through here (mentally, I picture him gallumphing in one of those party costumes where it’s supposed to look like you’re riding an ostrich– he attempts to maintain dignity by wielding his riding crop with Prussian savagery) all through Nibelungen Week. Now it’s the turn of Otto P, another exponent of the Mad Kraut school of direction.

Both, of course, are very considerable film genius types.

(Thanks to Scott Marks’ “KPBS Film Club of the Air” for the memorable image.)

To inaugurate Otto Phase Two, I’ll start with a little anecdote from Bambi Versus Godzilla, a collection of essays by professional word-carpenter and deceased liberal David Mamet. D.M. was approached by Otto “The Man With the Foam-rubber Cummerbund” Preminger for some abortive project or other, and in the process, and anecdote passed from one brain to the other.

OP: “When I voss makink EXODUS,” (okay, enough with the accent) “I needed a crowd of ten thousand people, to celebrate the founding of Israel. And I couldn’t afford to pay them.”

“What did you do?” asked the young playwright. 

“I charged them.”

Ads were taken out: “Be in a movie! Only five dollars!”

This is the peculiar kind of genius that has often caused Otto to be dismissed as a huckster rather than an artist. While holding in one’s mind the idea of Otto as a major artist (along with the image of him in foam-rubber belt and Fritz Lang in ostrich costume), I suggest we also make space for the crafty showman aspect of his personality, a major feature of the OP persona and an influence on the films he made — in the same way that Kubrick’s work was influenced by his desire to emulate the success of the biggest box office hits of all time — BARRY LYNDON/GONE WITH THE WIND (check out the identical death of the firstborn), THE SHINING/THE EXORCIST, AI/ET. The intent may sometimes have had to do with vulgar commercialism, but art got in the way.

SingAlongaLang

 

Results are IN for our strange and misconceived Fritz Lang songwriting competition!

We have three terrific runners-up. Regular Shadowplayer Alex Livingston weighed in with an introduction from Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) in M: THE MUSICAL:

‘I have to kill children to silence the voices,
they demand and demand and they leave me no choices.

‘So I spend all my money on balloonses and toyses.
To entice small children (girlses or boyses),

‘In their school uniforms, or best Sunday cardigans,
Down lonely dark alleys, to deserted backyard-igans.

‘The urges are boilers and the voices have stoked ‘em,
“I’d shout “run!” to the child, but I’ve already choked ‘em.’

When you see it put like that, the idea of a musical M comes to seem… worryingly plausible.

“Mammy!”

Star film-supplier Brandon (sorry, don’t know your last name) offered this short but sweet song for Edward G Robinson (and why has it taken this long for him to have one?)

‘Pursued by greedy men without inhibitions,
Hemmed in by geometric compositions,
Framed by bad paintings and women in windows,
At least my career’s better than Delroy Lindo’s.’

Funny, atmospheric, and above all TRUE.

Darryl McCarthy chimed in with an honorable entry, channelling the fugitive consciousness of Phil Spector to bring us THIS:

‘M’s so fine,
Doo-Lang, doo-Lang, doo-Lang,
M’s so fine,
Rot-Wang, Rot-Wang, Rot-Wang,
That handsome boy over there,
Doo-Lang, doo-Lang, doo-Lang,
The one with the wavy hair,
Rot-Wang, Rot-Wang, Rot-Wang,
etc etc
(sorry Chiffons, sorry everyone).

No need for apologies! The appropriateness of borrowing from a songwriter who’s actually been accused of murdering a film star seems unassailable.

Honorable mentions go to Mr. Lyrics himself, David Ehrenstein, for his many apt quotations (I especially enjoyed reading Nat King Cole’s song from THE BLUE GARDENIA — easy to forget the fever-dream collaboration of Cole and Lang!) and to the shadowy Comrade K for this evocative title: 

‘Here’s one for a musical SECRET BEHIND THE DOOR: “There’s a Room In My Heart (where your body lies bleeding)”‘

All of the above will receive a specially selected film of their dreams. How this will be done remains to be seen. But the overall winner has to be actual singing music-person Daniel Prendiville for the epic that is ~

THE BALLAD OF CHRISTOPHER CROSS

(with apologies to all concerned)

Well my name is Chris Cross
And I feel at a loss
Been a lowly book-keeper for years
And I wed sweet Adele
Who has made my life hell
And it’s driven me almost to tears

When Johnny hit Kitty
I felt full of pity
So much so I laid him out flat
Then I ran to the cops
Cause I’d busted his chops
But dear Kitty was knocked out at that

I told her I painted
And she nearly fainted
As dollar signs flashed in her eyes
While I fell besotted
With Johnny she plotted
I was too naive to realise

So I got her a flat
With some finances that
I embezzled at night from my boss
There my paintings I stored
Cause Adele had abhorred
My artwork as frivolous dross

Then a dealer came round
And thought he had found
In Kitty an artist supreme
And Adele’s ex appeared
Hadn’t died as she’d feared
It had all been a Dallas-like dream

But then Johnny and Kitty
Behaved intimitty
I saw them and became deranged
So I acted impulsive
Did something repulsive
Now my life will forever be changed…

(c) 2008 Daniel Prendiville

Daniel also wins the film of his dreams. And I look forward to hearing this on his next album. Reward him for this free entertainment by going HERE and buying his music! YOU will be the true winner.

Footnote: both the first MABUSE and METROPOLIS feature erotic dances in elaborate production numbers, where the design is incredibly lavish, but no actual choreography has been worked out. So the girls just kind of SPAZZ OUT, to use a politically incorrect but undeniably evocative phrase. It’s a little odd, since Lang notoriously charted out his actors’ movements in their regular scenes with all the precision of dance numbers.

Fritz and K.D. Lang

I’ll be posting the results of our Shadowplay Fritz Lang songwriting contest late tomorrow. But it’s not too late for any last-minute entries.

A young man is full of adventure,
and eager to do what he can!
He may be a boy, but don’t send a boy
To do the work of a man!
Get away — get away
Get away, young man, get away!
A young man will come when you call him,
And leave when you tell him to go,
But some day he’ll guess, a woman means yes,
Whenever a woman says no!
Get away…
A woman is only a creature
Of notions and dimples and lies
So learn if you can, this lesson, young man,
And don’t run off when she cries
Get away —get away…..
If you can! 

~ From Ken Darby’s song Get Away, Young Man, from Fritz Lang’s RANCHO NOTORIOUS.

And…

I’m a shadow since you’re gone
Just a shadow in the dawn
That breaks in the sand
A shadow lost in shadowland
My poor heart just flew away
When it realized one day
The dreams that we planned
Would only end in shadowland

~ From Shadowland, by K.D. Lang.

“I’m in love with a German film star…”

 

Only a few days remain for you to enter our Fritz Lang songwriting contest and win the film of your dreams*! To kind of get you in der mude, I’ve knocked up a jaunty little number entitled “Blue Gardenia Blues,” which goes like this ~

On Scarlet Street,
There’s a great big heat,
That warms you and me in and out.
There’s a house by the river,
That makes people shiver,
Beyond a reasonable doubt.

It’s called Moonfleet,
And it’s on Scarlet Street,
‘Neath the “M” sits the woman in the window,
With a look of contempt,
She says, “No one’s exempt,”
So you pay her and walk right on into -

The Ministry of Fear,
Where each eye has a tear,
And they number a thousand or more.
Check your cloak and your dagger,
And then you will stagger,
At the secret beyond the door.

Hangmen also die,
As the thousand eyes spy,
Chuck-a-luck is the game, you’re the loser.
Your fury is spent,
And you can’t pay the rent,
Cause the gambler’s Dr. Mabuse.

Each felicitous room,
Is an Indian tomb,
And you only live once, they say.
While the city sleeps,
And the thousand eyes weep,
And all human desire ebbs away.

*Normal dream conditions apply.

Babelsberg Psychos Go America

 

A Fever Dream Double Feature.

Following in the mighty footsteps of Christoph Hubert, whose Fever Dream pairings were published hereabouts recently, I present for your delectation and sweaty perusal another brain-bending duo of movies that go together all wrong. I have selected two films, and I call them Film One and Film Two.

(Note the flag attached to David Wayne’s lamp to keep his face in shadow.)

Film One is “M”. Not the celebrated Fritz Lang-Thea Von Harbou 1931 classic, but the generally denigrated Joseph Losey remake from twenty years later. As films maudit go, the don’t come much mauditer than this. While Losey is much admired, mainly for his British films of the ’60s (the blacklist having driven him from Hollywood), his U.S. work is a mixed bunch, much of it rarely screened. The excellent noir THE PROWLER (many noirs tackle the theme of “wrong values,” but none so starkly as this) rubs shoulders with the curio that is THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR, a jejeune anti-war parable that passes the time acceptably just by being very very odd. In this company, the M remake is just one more mis-step in Losey’s shaky Hollywood career arc, but fortunately it’s a bit closer to the intensity of PROWLER than the fey loopiness of GREEN HAIR.

The perennially prissy David Wayne essays the Lorre role, doing well with the hysteria but entirely missing Lorre’s uncanny, bug-eyed froth. The script pads out the predestined devil with some unconvincing dollar book Freud cod psychology.

Losey scores a little better with his cops and crooks — one detective is a virtual fascist, with less respect for the rule of law than the “punks and tinhorns” he yearns to subject to the rubber hose treatment. Luther Adler plays an alcoholic mob lawyer (called Langley in presumed homage, though old Fritz didn’t appreciate the gesture, turning up to single-handedly picket the premiere). This figure’s presence helps set up the kangaroo court more plausibly, but he’s an annoying character wrapped around an annoying performance (dialogue scribe Waldo Salt may have to shoulder some blame here. Salt, later blacklisted himself, made a glorious comeback as writer of MIDNIGHT COWBOY in the ’70s, but his work here is mostly on a Dick Tracy level, with a few corny left-wing pretensions). The rogues’ gallery gets livelier around the intense, ferret-eyed Martin Gabel (also director of one movie, the terrific THE LOST MOMENT, a labyrinth of sinuous camera moves with a centenarian Agnes Moorehead at its heart) and his henchmen: Raymond Burr, more hench than man, doing a gravelly voice like Putney Swope; Glenn Anders, not as soapy as in THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (”Just doing a little taaaaarrrget practice,”) but sort of CHUNKIER; and Norman Lloyd, always always always a reliably sneaky face to fill out a frame.

But this “M” has its greatest success in the use of locations. Losey makes fine use of Bunker Hill and outstanding use of the Bradbury Building. Best known now as the site of BLADE RUNNER’s climax, this striking construction came to its architect in a dream, and Losey captures both the sharpness and the illogic of nightmare in the clamorous conflict he stages there. Each angle provides a bizarre and startling new perspective to affront the eyes and make giddy the mind.

And Losey’s eerie mannequin warehouse is better than Kubrick’s eerie mannequin warehouse in KILLER’S KISS. In moments like this one can feel that Lang’s cautionary horror tale has found a new home in the city of angels.

Film Two is DR. CALIGARI, another U.S. remake of a German classic, this one directed by Stephen Sayadian, (A.K.A. Rinse Dream / François Délia / Sidney Falco / F.X. Pope / Ladi von Jansky) maker of the cult sci-fi porno CAFE FLESH, which I’d previously seen and failed to admire.

This struck me as much better! Sayadian, whose speciality is production design, crafts a low-budget expressionist world and stages a sort of Cartoon Network VIDEODROME ballet in it. Everything is over-stylised to the point of panic-attack claustrophobia, the movements are choreographed and the blocking avoids standard continuity and settles for a snappy succession of ruthlessly composed tableaux, shuffled like smutty playing cards in the hands of a stoned dealer. Imagery tends to the nauseating (weeping sores) and peculiar (a wall with a giant mouth) rather than the sexy, but most effective porn is totally boring as art anyway. Sayadian is probably more interested in arousing the pineal gland or something weird like that.

See this thing! It’ll make you feel weird, which you ought to enjoy if you like reading this stuff. In addition to the purely visual pleasures (and the retro fun of the ’80s synth-score), Sayadian makes the best use of porno-style acting I’ve ever seen, creating an expressionistically oneiric B-movie vibe out of his performers’ limitations, reminiscent in its delirium of Ed Wood’s avant-garde trash aesthetic.

Madeleine Reynal, with clipped Mittel-European delivery, essays the role of Caligari’s grand-daughter, following in her “grrandvasser’s vootschteps,” as the late Kenneth Mars might put it, while Laura Albert brings agreeably mannered body language, and an agreeably mannered body, to the role of science project Mrs. Van Outen. Albert slices through the film, nipples primed to at any instant pierce some unsuspecting fellow thespian and pump them full of silicone. It’s not surprising to learn that when she’s not playing characters with “names” like “Bambi” and “Strip Joint Girl” and “Whipped Cream Girl” (in the TV show Dream On — some may remember this) L.A. is a stunt artist: she has a robust physicality to her and in a way this whole performance — nay, this whole film — is a death-defying piece of stunt art.

If you see Losey’s “M”, I hope it’s the same copy I have — a glitchy AVI file of a fuzzy DVD of a chewed-up VHS of a ropey telecine of a speckly print — because you get the surreal impression that the ’50s remake is older than the ’30s original.

If you see DR. CALIGARI… say hi.

I’m quite staggeringly indebted to Shadowplayer Brandon  for providing these movies, after I mentioned having never seen the J-Lo “M”. I should mention right now that I am in no way averse to FREE STUFF. If you stay alert you may catch me dropping the occasional hint, such as “I’ve never seen this film,” which you may all take as your cue to offer me complimentary bootlegs. I promise I won’t mind.

In Der Mude

 

I’m still reeling at the concept of a musical version of Fritz Lang’s DER MUDE TOD / DESTINY. If you recall, this was seriously mooted by producer Arthur Brauner as a project for Lang to undertake upon his return to Germany at the end of the ’50s.

Of course, this was the great era of the East German musical, but a West German song-and-dance based on Thea Von Harbou’s original “book” would be quite something. Lang, of course, had musical experience in Hollywood, having directed YOU AND ME, with music by Kurt Weill, and I guess RANCHO NOTORIOUS is pretty tuneful.

But what would a late period musical Lang be like?

I can’t help thinking that it might be something like this:

Enter a Young Woman (Elke Sommer), bereft at her loved one’s disappearance behind a great wall with no doors.

To the tune of “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise.”

YOUNG WOMAN
I must find a way to the other side,
And get back my missing man!
Perhaps with an overdose of cyanide,
I can execute this plan!

(Takes poison, finds self in new surroundings.)

Now I’m within,
I must just have a look round,
Begin,
To get my missing man found,
I’ll climb this stairway to paradise,
And get back my missing man!

Enter Death (Gert Frobe), singing to the tune of “Hi Ho”.

DEATH
I’m death! I’m Death!
I’ll take your final breath!
I’ll take you all
Behind my wall
I’m Death, I’m Death, I’m Death!

Segues into “You’re my little Choo-chee Face,” from CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG.

YOUNG WOMAN
Destiny! Destiny!
No escaping death for me!

DEATH
And it seems to me,
You lived your life,
Like a candle in Berlin…

YOUNG WOMAN
Berlin? You take my breath away!

DEATH
Oh. Okay.

Observant readers will have noticed that these are THE WORST LYRICS EVER. Win unspecified goodies by writing better ones! Remember, DER MUDE TOD has several different storylines woven together, so there’s plenty of scope. You could wax poetic about the field with the 99-year-lease, the Chinese emperor’s fireworks display, or the baby in the burning building.

To make it even easier (not everyone has seen DER MUDE TOD) you can musicalize any Lang film. You could have M FOR MUSIC, METROPOLIS MELODY, or THE DANCING DOCTOR MABUSE (”If you knew Mabuse like I know Mabuse…”).

At least one rhyming couplet is necessary to qualify as a lyric. The German musical is an underappreciated genre, so come on, all you Irving Berliners and Helmut Kohl Porters. Don’t let your candor ebb! You may be a learner but you needn’t be low!

Deadline: one week from today.

Prize: the film of your dreams.*

*Normal dream-conditions apply.