Spookshow

Shadowplay!

Craziness from VIY, a Russian fantasy film based (faithfully!) on a story by Nikolai Gogol.

The story was also the source for Mario Bava’s BLACK SUNDAY / MASK OF SATAN, but Bava and his co-scenarists changed the story out of all recognition — possibly out of fear of touching on religious matters. One gets the impression they only left Gogol’s name in the credits to lend the film class. Not that they need have worried, that seminal slice of Italian gothic is in a class by itself.

But the Italian version uses just the Russian setting and the idea of a cursed dead girl, whereas Georgi Kropachyov and Konstantin Yershov’s film follows Gogol’s tall tale fairly exactly, expanding it from short story form by the simple method of vastly inflating the fantasy sequences with hordes of phantoms (Gogol’s story is already pretty excessive). The above is only a small selection from the carnival of creeps at the climax.

The Witch’s Ride

From THE VIY, based on a short story by Gogol. This has to be the most beautiful witch-flight on film outside of KIKI’S DELIVERY SERVICE. Unlike me, the movie is beautiful and AVAILABLE.

Disneyland Blue

I had to show an example of this particular colour in the Bava palette. While it’s probably correct to call it Prussian Blue, and while one can imagine Erich Von Stroheim looking good in it with matching plume and sash, and while you can also see it in Tashlin and Jerry Lewis films shot in Gorgeous Lifelike Colour By Deluxe, I submit that Walt Disney and Tinkerbell totally OWN THIS COLOUR.

Cinematographer and director Mario Bava also had the use of it, as shown here in ESTHER AND THE KING, because he had All The Colors Of The Dark.

Esther and the swing

A fever-dream double feature.

Channel 4, home of the cut-price movie matinee, has been showing afternoon films all week starring that AXIOM OF CINEMA, Joan Collins. Two of them had solid auteur credentials, if we can allow the use of the a-word, so I checked them out. That’s Shadowplay — faithfully watching Joan Collins movies, so you don’t have to.

ESTHER AND THE KING has the double-whammy of being directed (and produced, and co-written) by mighty eye-patch wearing wild man Raoul Walsh, and photographed by Mario Bava. I’d caught glimpses of this movie and I’m a sucker for Bava’s trademark Disneyland Blue, which is on display in nearly all this movie’s interiors. Word has it that Walsh liked Bava’swork so much he delegated most of of E&TK to him. It’s certainly a film that has more in common with Bava’s KNIVES OF THE AVENGER or HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD than it does with WHITE HEAT or GENTLEMAN JIM. Since Bava’s primary focus is the visual, when given his head as a cinematographer he can really subsume a film into his style, becoming its auteur by default (I still don’t like that word, but you know what I mean — the person with the unifying vision). And since energy was always a big part of the Walsh approach, and there’s far less of that in his later work, there is a void to be filled.

(Late-period Walsh is unlikely to win the consideration lately awarded to late Hawks, Ford or Lang. Persons hoping to admire Walsh in his Mature Phase are recommended to sit through THE SHERIFF OF FRACTURED JAW, a Western of Damaged Brain uniting Kenneth More [British cinema's perennial "decent bloke"] with Jayne Mansfield [I.Q. of a genius but she kept it off the screen] and then give the whole thing up as a bad job.)

Bava fills the void with mind-frazzling candy colours, seen to best advantage in the film’s numerous palace entertainments, starring dancing girls in revealing tunics, or unconvincingly miming Nubian singers – the voice is THAT WOMAN who does all the Ennio Morricone wailing. While it doesn’t quite slide into the autistic trance-state of Howard Hughes’ SON OF SINBAD, which stops the “plot” for a belly-dance every 3 frames (David Bordwell would break his clicker trying to keep score), giving new meaning to the phrase “navel-gazing”, this is still a film more interested in bringing on the next dance number than in sorting out Judeo-Persian politics — and who can blame it? Even in Channel 4’s lamentably cropped 16:9 version, these scenes have a wondrous lustre and pop, as fleshy Italian chorines writhe and stagger. 

A classic Bava shot: symmetrical framing, asymmetrical and unmotivated coloured lighting on the lions.

Of course, Bava wasn’t hugely interested in performance, and I know you’ll shudder in terror as you read this, but Joan Collins is the best actor in ESTHER AND THE KING. There, I’ve said it. Such a thing exists — a film where Joan stands supreme, talent-wise, if only because she’s surrounded by an unbeatable selection of human planks, lugs, stiffs and dolts. The camp harem commandant is the closest thing to a characterisation on offer (eunuch = homosexual in E&TK’s schema).

Joan’s scenes in the harem are among the most amusing. She starts the film in fine form, attempting random bursts of American accent and doing truly extraordinary things with her face while everybody around her is trying to act. In closeup she’s more subdued, having presumably been fed the Hedy Lamarr dictum on how to look beautiful: “Just stand still and look stupid.” This, Joan can do.

The Persian shagging-palace is depicted herein as a less austere version of the famous Rank Charm School, where the real-life Joan, along with Barbara Steele and Julie Christie, was educated in deportment, enunciation and, well, charm. This fine institution is satirised in Lauder and Gilliat’s LADY GODIVA RIDES AGAIN, a film in which Joan has an uncredited cameo, along with half the British film industry (”Laughable term!” says Alistair Sim). The school’s graduates were trained in disguising any traces of a working class accent (the late Stratford Johns took great satisfaction in telling me how “common” the Collins sisters were back in the early ’50s), walking with a book balanced atop their heads, and getting out of cars without revealing their underwear to the photographers (not yet known as paparazzi) — would that today’s celebs boasted such a skill-set!

Gorgeous lifelike colour by Deluxe!

Joan gets sent to finishing school all over again in THE GIRL ON THE RED VELVET SWING, a true-crime story directed by Richard Fleischer. Fleischer did a stupendous job with (working backwards) 10 RILLINGTON PLACE (the Christie murders, very accurate), THE BOSTON STRANGLER (heavily fictionalised) and a very decent job on COMPULSION (Leopold & Loeb, quasi-accurate as far as it goes). This movie climaxes act 2 with a scandalous homicide, but it isn’t primarily a crime film, more of a woman’s picture (red drapes behind the credit sequence) and Joan is the woman whose picture it is.

Ray Milland is Stanford White, America’s greatest architect of the gilded age. Farley Granger is the spoiled and possibly psychotic Harry Thaw. Joan is Floradora Girl Evelyn Nesbitt, who throws herself at the married Milland (”She’s a stupid slut,” pronounced Fiona, and I believe there was a hint of disapproval in her tone) before allowing herself to be wooed by Granger.

Things the movie omits to tell us: White was carrying on with lots of other chorus girls too; he may have drugged their champagne in order to date-rape them; Thaw was a coke fiend; he had a fondness for beating women with a dog whip; Nesbitt became impregnated by John Barrymore; her abortion was procured at a finishing school run by the mother of Cecil B DeMille.

In the movie, Joan’s abortion is instead a nervous breakdown (I guess the logic is, “We need something shameful but not sexual”), presented in a series of lap dissolves as she tosses in her delirium: montage=mental illness. Producer and co-screenwriter Charles Brackett (working with Walter Reisch, previously his collaborator on NINOTCHKA) struggles to get any dramatic fire going. Joan is remarkably good-ish in this — she must have devolved a bit between GIRL and ESTHER. 20th Century Fox had planned to cast Marilyn Monroe, but she was on suspension. Ray Milland is always reliable, but can’t really be outstanding in the part as written. Granger has the flashiest role but he can’t quite make a show-stopper out of it, he’s not really that kind of actor. Brad Dourif had the role in RAGTIME, and he’s a much better idea.

At the film’s “climax”, Joan must sway a jury single-handedly, with a testimony so powerful that they are forced to acquit a man arrested for publicly shooting an old guy in the face, in the crowded theatre of Madison Square Garden, while shouting “He ruined my wife!” (In the real-life case, nobody could say for sure whether it was “wife” or “life”. A minor point — the guy was still dead.)

DIGRESSION: Now, I’ve seen Joan in the witness box FOR REAL, and I have to say, she wasn’t thatcompelling. This was when she attempted to follow her sister Jacqui into the world of best-selling bonkbuster novels, and was sued by her publisher for the return of her six-figure advance after she failed to provide them with sufficiently publishable dross (a sample:“‘Don’t call me your little cabbage,’ she said savagely. ‘I’m nobody’s cabbage.’”). Joan, her head inserted into wig styled like freshly whipped soufflé, made a poor witness, mainly because she seemed too profoundly THICK to understand when she was being asked a question, of that she was expected to answer. But in fairness to her, this may have been a deliberate strategy — her best chance of winning the case (she won) was in proving that the publishers got exactly what they deserved when they asked her to knock up a couple of novels. Skeptics may wonder whether Joan is a good enough actress to fool an entire courtroom, but I remind you: she was playing the part of a dumb actress. “Stand still and look stupid” may be equally good advice for the witness box.

DIGRESSION ON DIGRESSION: The best movie star courtroom scene played for real was that of Lana Turner, defending her daughter for knifing well-endowed gangster Johnny Stompanato to death. She gave a real Lana Turner performance, completely artificial from beginning to end and completely convincing to everybody concerned.

END OF DIGRESSIONS: Fleischer’s direction only takes off during the scene when Millandfinally gets Collins on his swing. With dizzying, nauseating POV shots, Fleischer shows her ascending to the ceiling and attempting to kick holes in the skylight. We get a glimpse of the campy wallow in bad taste this film could have been if Fleischer had been allowed to report the true story and play to Joan’s strengths. The Fleischer of MANDINGO could have had a ball with that.

The movie needs more SUBTLE FORESHADOWING, like the skulls, screen right.

Star ‘60

You know me, I love an imaginary landscape. Don’t let this guy stop you, have a look around… 

All this stuff is from an East German-Polish sci-fi movie called THE SILENT STAR. It stars the beautiful Yoko Tani and a bunch of equally beautiful special effects. It’s a shellac-bright vision of the communist future we could all be enjoying right now if only Ronald Reagan hadn’t single-handedly won the Cold War with his bare fists, damn his greasy mane! If not for his senile single-mindedness, THIS COULD BE YOU:

Thanks to filmmaker Steve Sullivan for this one!

The film isn’t so very great, it shares some of the lack of characterisation and narrative drive that a lot of US sci-fi from the 50s suffers from, but these images will sear themselves onto your retinas (which, I dunno, you might or might not enjoy). They’re like the kind of thing Mario Bava was doing with PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES, only here they have a bit of a budget.

It’s rare to find a sci-fi film with imagery as lurid and beautiful as cheap paperback art. The only thing missing is a half-naked girl in copper pasties. But this film is way too serious for that.

I would sort of like to visit the Silent Star, though it does look a bit inhospitable and scary. But if I had Yoko to protect me I’d be OK.

Book your vacation now!

The Mario Bava Film School #2

I guess cats really do look bigger when they rear up!

 

Either that, or it’s a really small chair.

The Mario Bava Film School #1

Q: How do you light a scene taking place in a cavern at the centre of the earth with no conceivable light source?

A: Extravagantly.

But I would also accept “Jubilantly”, “Luridly”, and “With gusto”.

Off the Map

These imaginary landscapes from Mario Bava’s HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD, composited in-camera from miniatures, magazine cut-outs, and occasionally some actual life-sized live-action (tiny figures on the cliff on the right of [3]) may not be REAL, per se, but they have a physical existence beyond that of the digital landscapes of Zemeckis’ BEOWULF, and that seems to matter to me.

I hope I’m not a Luddite — I’ve used C.G.I. with pleasure in my short INSIDE AN UNCLE and the TV show INTERGALACTIC KITCHEN. But there’s a tendency to use it to tackle every problem nowadays, when maybe it’s only the right solution SOME of the time. For instance, did anybody find the computer generated bugs-crawling-under-the-skin in Stephen Sommers’ THE MUMMY half as disturbing as the bulges that traverse the body of the hapless inhabitee in Cronenberg’s SHIVERS? The difference is, one thing is incontestably THERE, in front of the camera, and the other, we know, isn’t.

*

I don’t think I need SAY anything to connect this post to our Nibelungen Week here at Shadowplay. A picture (or two) tells it better:

Lang’s DIE NIBELUNGEN is a magnesium-tipped arrow fired at the rooftops of epic entertainment, which overshoots and ignites a mausoleum of APOCALYPTIC GRANDEUR.

Bava’s HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD is a piece of cheeky matinee fun, with a slightly off-colour malaise lurking somewhere behind its Technicolor dioramas. Bava’s dark side always provides a subtly bitter aftertaste, while Lang’s is like swallowing one of those booby-trapped Monty Python chocolates where steel bolts shoot out through your cheeks.

“I understand you have rooms to let.”

 

I blogged earlier about how I stole a bit of Alec Guinness’ entrance in THE LADYKILLERS for my short film CLARIMONDE.

While I put my hands up and admit this without shame, I’d like to trace the influences that led to actor Alec Guinness and director Alexander “Sandy” Mackendrick achieving what they do in that scene in the first place, to the extent that I can. Partly to show that everybody steals, which makes me feel good about myself, and partly to try and illuminate the evolution of ideas in cinema, through one small example.

Mackendrick quotes below are taken from Philip Kemp’s majestic Lethal Innocence, which should nestle next to Mackendrick’s On Filmmaking on your bookshelves.

Exhibit A: THE LODGER. Hitchcock pulls of many grand effects in the expressionist manner in this, his first thriller. It’s worth noting that for both Hitch and Mackendrick were greatly influenced by Fritz Lang and the German style of the twenties and early thirties. Also, both men were graphic designers before they were filmmakers…

Matinee idol and sexual unusualist* Ivor Novello enters with a scarf concealing his lower face (like Malcolm McDowell, 40 years later in IF…). Guinness will appropriate the scarf, and the idea of revealing his lower face first, but he uses the lowering of his hat to achieve this effect:

Both Katy Johnson and the landlady in Hitch’s film are frail, older women (KJ to a markedly greater degree), afflicted with dowager’s hump, and there is an immediate sense of outrage that they might be menaced by this interloper. Both films play upon this unimaginable threat of violence being brought into a respectable home by some mysterious outsider.

The idea of showcasing Guinness’ trick teeth seems to have been present from the very beginning of the character’s conception. According to Mackendrick, Guinness at first saw the character in even more grotesque terms:

‘He sidled across my office as though he had a dislocated hip, which was quite gruesome but horrendously funny. So Seth and I had to say, “No, sorry, Balcon will never stand for it.” Alec got rather annoyed, and sulked for a little, and went and looked out of the window. And while I was talking about the script he was snipping away with a pair of scissors, and he made some paper teeth which he stuck in, then turned around and grinned at me.’

Guinness claims to have had in mind the Wolf from Red Riding Hood as his main model. But when he saw himself in makeup, he remarked to Mackendrick, “I look remarkably like an aged Ken Tynan; perhaps I’d better smoke cigarettes the way he does.”

(Guinness work emulating Tynan’s way with a ciggie raises him into the pantheon of Great Dramatic Smokers. Of course, Bacall and Bogart look great exhaling smoke, as does Valentino and, in more recent times, rather surprisingly, Helena Bonham Carter in FIGHT CLUB. But for finding weird and impressive ways of actually handlinga cancer stick, I give you my Triumvirate of Nicotine: George C. Scott, Travolta, Savalas. Telly actually adopted the Kojak lollipop in order to wean himself off the snout, and the sweet solution was suggested by none other than Mario Bava, in whose LISA AND THE DEVIL the trademark lolly makes its debut. Now you know.)

Mackendrick went further, insisting that the entire performance was a gothic exaggeration of the Tynan persona, perhaps a revenge on behalf of the acting profession upon a famous critic (more on this theme soon). I don’t know if Tynan had ever been cruel about Guinness, but he called Ralph Richardson “the glass eye in the forehead of the British public,” which, as Sir Ralph noted, is uncertain as to meaning but doesn’t sound altogether complimentary.

But there is still more behind this characterisation. In LONDON BELONGS TO ME, directed by former Hitchcock scriptwriter (THE LADY VANISHES) Sidney Gilliat, Alastair Sim (native of Edinburgh) presents himself as lodger at the home of a middle-aged spinster, in an uncannily similar way:

I’ve ALWAYS felt that Guinness’ performance had something to do with Sim’s, in fact, as a child I believe I thought that WAS Sim playing the part in THE LADYKILLERS. Professor Marcus has the same shabby-gentile, vulpine weariness as Sim’s Dickensian fake medium, Mr. Squales.

And even then, there’s more. Moving beyond the character’s first few moments (about which there’s even more to say!), we get what seems to me a direct quote from Max Schreck’s iconic performance in NOSFERATU:

To present this character in all his glory, Mackendrick and his team give him a big build up. Composer and sound designer Tristram Carey (later of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop) brilliantly organises music and FX to one end, creating a sort of dark cartoon soundscape where everything builds to a hysterical crescendo as Guinness rings the doorbell. Then there’s the beauty of the delayed appearance itself, as Guinness stalks Johnson to her home, a variety of pieces of trained furniture obtruding to conceal Guinness’ face. A high angle shot following the pair of them from roughly the POV of an invisible urban giraffe, seems drawn from John Brahm’s Hollywood remake of THE LODGER, though maybe it goes further back, to Lang’s M.

And on top of all that, Graham Linehan points out: “By the way, did you ever notice how Guinness is turning into a crow in ‘The Ladykillers’? Watch the way he lifts his coat up when he’s putting his hands on his hips.”

Well, now that you mention it… Maybe this is why all the raven imagery in the depressing Coen Bros remake. I mean, I know it’s there because of Poe and the whole Southern Gothic thing, but maybe…

One moment of Sir Alec’s monstro perf seems entirely sui generis and without precedence in the annals of screen acting. On his way upstairs, forced to respond to remark by Mrs. W, he delivers his reply from under his arm.

It’s not exactly the shock of recognition, is it? But it’s grand stuff.

Anyhow, it is perhaps worth mentioning that the story of THE LADYKILLERS, like those other grisly tales FRANKENSTEIN and DRACULA and DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE, came to its author (American screenwriter William Rose) in a dream…

The movie has, in turn, influenced other filmmakers — Nick Park’s THE WRONG TROUSERS is probably the most famous that refers directly back to Mackendrick’s film.

*

*Novello’s penchant was to lie naked in a glass coffin, feigning death, while muscular workmen filed in and mourned him, sexually.

Happy Birthday Jules Dassin!

I was rooting for Billy Wilder to outlive Leni Riefenstahl but he let me down. 

 

Director Jules Dassin is 96. Maybe he’ll do it. At any rate, I wish him good health and happiness.

Above is 10.30PM SUMMER, a massively underrated film by Dassin and Marguerite Duras. It’s available on DVD in the U.S. now, you should all get it. Gorgeous crazy lighting by Gábor Pogány that reminds me of Mario Bava, and an aesthetic reminiscent of silent movie melodrama, although I should add that the sound design is awesome. There’s a driving-around-at-night sequence that exactly pre-echoes Fellini’s TOBY DAMMIT, and the whole vibe is like an art film from two or even four years later. And given the speed at which cinema was moving in the mid-to-late sixties, that puts J.D. well ahead of the curve.

 

Sadly, it was the last feature from Dassin’s years of peripatetic cinema: I’d love to see what he’d have done next. Back in America he made a “blaxploitation” remake of THE INFORMER called UP TIGHT, which is better than the title and concept suggest. And then he made one of Richard Burton’s last films, with a teenage Tatum O’Neal. No, it’s not very good, but he couldn’t get out of it.

(I heard that on 1984, Burton’s last film, his curiously weak arms had to be puppeteered from below the shot to make him seem alive. A great actor, reduced to the level of Kermit the Frog. This was an aftereffect of an operation to remove crystallized alcohol from the Great Man’s spine…)

In America in the forties Dassin had made THE NAKED CITY, THIEVES HIGHWAY and BRUTE FORCE, all compelling and poetic films noir.Mark Hellinger, who produced TNC, contributes a world-weary voice-over which smoothly lulls you into the subconscious of New York City, city of eight million stories.

Persecuted by the House Unamerican Activities Committee, Dassin headed for Europe, stopping in England to make NIGHT AND THE CITY, a US-style noir with a London setting and American stars. It’s a masterpiece and I hope to write more about it soon.

Then began the roving years. Dassin is undervalued, a bit like Alberto Cavalcanti: both men worked in so many countries, and did great work in all of them, and the people of those countries think, “He’s great, but he didn’t do much.” It’s almost impossible to gather all the films together and see the total achievement. Also, David Thompson’s overview of Dassin’s work in his Biographical Dictionary of Film is a disgrace: so often where DT could do some good by drawing attention to neglected work, he is lazy and bored and just piles on another layer of dust.

Using the stage name Perlo Vita, Dassin acted in his first French film, the ultimate caper movie, RIFIFI. Using his own name, he starred in NEVER ON SUNDAY in Greece with his wife, the rather overwhelming Melina Mercouri.

She also stars in TOPKAPI, a favourite film of mine. An archivist acquaintance claims it gave him a headache for a week, but never mind, *I* like it. A PINK PANTHER-like international heist comedy with no Americans in it. I like Americans, especially American actors, but there’s something refreshing about their absence here. And I would eschew the Rat Pack anyday to go on a caper with Mercouri, Maximilian Schell, Peter Ustinov, Robert Morley and Akim Tamiroff!

There are still plenty of Dassins I haven’t had the pleasure of: PHAEDRA, THIS MAN MUST DIE, THE REHEARSAL. Hope to see them all soon, and I hope the happy longevity of this sparkling, sharp-eyed filmmaker continues for many more years.