Dead Man Walking (slowly)

I’m sorry, but I forget who it was in the comments section many years ago who remarked that John Boorman’s POINT BLANK is a stealth remake of Michael Curtiz’s THE WALKING DEAD — just like Karloff in ’36, Lee Marvin in ’68 dies in a prison, comes back from the dead, and causes his enemies to fall to their deaths without laying a finger on them.

Which is wild — I cannot imagine John Boorman consciously being influenced by a Warner Bros horror movie, even if it’s an unusual horror-gangster crossover (see also BLACK FRIDAY, 1940, and the superior B THE MONSTER AND THE GIRL), perhaps trading on the fact that Karloff had been in SCARFACE, or maybe more on the fact that Warners were better known for crime thrillers than for shockers.

Speaking of shocking — an excellent lab with Strickfadenesque equipment and Deutsch tilts — the influence of BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN is apparent, though Curtiz was an aficionado of the canted angle, to the point that I’ve sometimes suspected him of having one leg shorter than the other, the better to run around the hills of his native Hungary — putting Karloff on a tilted slab also seems to motivate the expressionism.

Edmund Gwenn is the not mad, just very determined scientist who raises the wrongly executed Boris from the dead, more than halfway. I’d always thought of Gwenn as more of a giant ant man, personally.

Joking aside, this is one of Warners’ most sombre, even melancholic horrorshows. DR X is a hoot, MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM pretty breezy, except from the viewpoint of the doomed artist Atwill. I wish Curtiz had revisited the genre later, as Roy Del Ruth did (he inaugurated the studio’s scary output with THE TERROR, the second all-talking picture, now lost, and his 1954 PHANTOM OF THE RUE MORGUE gives equal screentime to Charles Gemora in an ape suit and Karl Malden, the same year he made ON THE WATERFRONT).

When you find me blogging this late at night (it’s 11.50pm in the Shadowplayhouse) you know I’ve been busy, and as luck would have it the current project (and I’m very glad not to be making two at once anymore) is very Halloweeny…

THE WALKING DEAD stars Hjalmar Poelzig; Sam Spade; Kris Kringle; Jane Withersteen; Britt Reid – the Green Hornet; Lt. of Detectives Dundy; Dr. Emile Roux; Sheriff Keogh; Mike O’Reilly; Spudsy Drake; Japanese Gardener (uncredited); Michael Axford; Captain Anderson; Man calling for Mrs Jones; Detective Bates; Love’s Greatest Mistake; and Count Broko.

The Killer Beard

Can facial hair destroy a movie? I’m enjoying the look of Sidney Furie’s THE APPALOOSA, but every time it cuts to a closeup of star Marlon Brando, the cheesecloth beard surround kills it. Fuzzy felt moustache, too.

I’ve cheated and skipped ahead: at some point, Brando shaves. The relief is tremendous. Garbo talks! Brando shaves! Having a star you can’t look upon without wincing or laughing is a disadvantage for any film. One should be able to see past phony whiskers — as with any very visible fault in a film, one should be able to say, “OK, we know this aspect is bad, but what else is on offer?”

What’s on offer is Russell Metty shooting a Sid Furie film — the baroque compositions of TOUCH OF EVIL are back — Metty proves himself as skilled a channeller of the Furie style as he was of the Wellesian.

You either enjoy this malarkey or you don’t.

Brando’s performance seems decent. You might expect any time he caught sight of his reflection he’d be thrown off by the aura of falsity radiating from his chin. The fright wig is bad too. That’s quite a large proportion of the main actor’s head rendered immediately bogus. To be called upon to project truth from within a sort of furry doughnut is too much to ask even if the Greatest Actor Alive (Then). I’m reminded of Coral Brown’s line about the fur hat she had on for a part: “I feel I’m as though looking out of a yak’s arsehole.”

It’s a Universal Picture! Furie is hemmed in by studio personnel just as Brando is by face-fungus. Not just Pacific Title providing their standard yellow font, and Metty providing delirious compositions, but editor Ted Kent who goes back to BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN. In one of the early beard scenes, Kent, Metty and Furie put their heads together and come up with this:

A whiplash-inducing set of angle-changes: Emilio Fernández swaggers in in shot one, and is still moving when we cut to him rock-steady in shot two, a classic Furie occlusion-job where the dirty part of the “dirty single” is allowed to eat up half the frame, to deliberately uncomfortable effect. Then we ignore any nagging thoughts about eye-lines and jump to shot three, in which El Indio is just a nose and mouth. It appears that the rule of jump-cuts can be stretched to apply to different kinds of odd discontinuity (the rue of jump-cuts is that one jump-cut will bother the viewer, unless another one follows it fairly quickly, at which point it becomes accepted as a DEVICE). Here, the mismatch on movement between shots one and two makes the line-cross on shot three somehow acceptable. It says to the viewer, “We’re doing this. Deal with it.”

I can deal with it. But Brando’s beard?

I’m keen to see if Kent is going to treat us to a James Whale type straight-down-the-line cut at some point.

THE APPALOOSA stars Jor-El; Aimee Thanatogenous; Mapache; Dr. Marcello Bassi; 1st Man; Mama Montana; Victoriano Huerta; Mrs. Martini; Thug #1; and Flub-a-Dub

Bride of the American Werewolf

We’re going to see BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN at Filmhouse today, introduced by John Landis.

Landis has a nice ongoing relationship with Edinburgh — he was retrospected by Edinburgh International Film Festival, he shot parts of BURKE AND HARE here (here hare here) and now he’s a guest of Dead By Dawn, our long-running horror fest.

My connection to the BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, always intense (though I never saw it as a little kid — took me years), is even more meaningful now, since I recently completed an epic video essay for the forthcoming Masters of Cinema release of THE OLD DARK HOUSE. So I can call myself a Whaler with the best of them.

The confluence of Landis and BRIDE makes me want to pitch a sequel to his maybe-best film — Anthony Waller’s AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN PARIS is best forgotten, which is fine, because it has been. BRIDE OF AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON would star Jenny Agutter, who provided the romantic interest in the first film. It would turn out that lycanthropy is also a sexually transmitted condition. I mean, who’s to say she didn’t get bitten by her boyfriend during their sexytimefun in the original movie? There’s definitely something oral going on.

(Big cunnilingus scene in KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE too. Obviously a Landis favourite. Maybe that’s why he wears a beard, so he always feels like he’s… Should I ask him? Probably best not.)

Anyway, werewolf Agutter, that’s the pitch. We can work the details out later.

This prospective encounter feels very timely, since my friend Stephen Murphy, a brilliant make-up artist, just met Rick Baker, creator of Landis’s werewolf (and so much more) at the Monsterpalooza convention (yes, this a thing). Stephen was made up as a zombie Rick Baker at the time. I can’t compete with that.