The Undersea Adventures of Craig McKenzie

As a kid I saw various undersea scifi movies, all terrible I think, but I never saw LATITUDE ZERO, alas. I think I would have dug it. It’s a lot more than terrible. There was one really boring one with lots of enlarged fish which we walked out of at the Odeon, Clerk Street — I’m idly curious as to what it was, but all I remember is the fish.

Then there’s one I saw the end of on TV that has a collapsing belltower underwater, and a long shot of a spoon, I think, dropped into the water and going down, down, down… I’d be grateful for any info you can give me about the title. (OK, YouTube to the rescue — the belltower seems to be from CITY BENEATH THE SEA of 1953, which has Robert Ryan but no spoon, so that’s a different movie. The spoon was a ladle on a wire, and it appears in CAPTAIN NEMO AND THE UNDERWATER CITY, also with Robert Ryan.)

Also on the big screen we saw THE AMAZING CAPTAIN NEMO, a jumped-up TV movie, which as kids we found entertaining enough (Nemo is José Ferrer this time. He issues his 20th-century guests with puffy pirate shirts which they pronounce to be INCREDIBLY COMFORTABLE and that’s all I remember. I was thrilled by the idea of the amazing Nemo chemise. I mean, these guys were on a Victorian submarine with laser cannons and everything, but the shirts were so comfortable that’s what amazed them.)

Joseph Cotten in LATITUDE ZERO is Nemo too, in a slashed-to-the-waist shirt, but they don’t call him that, they call him Craig McKenzie (which they pronounce “Cregg” because they’re Americans and Japanese). He’s a Scottish submariner from the nineteenth century who pilots a Nautilus-type sub with laser cannons and lives in an undersea kingdom or domed city if you will. With constant harpsichord muzak, or is it the score?

This is probably Cotten’s only Japanese fantasy film based on a radio series. He’s allowed one.

It’s not that Cotten, and Cesar “Butch” Romero and Patricia Medina have forgotten how to act, I think, more that Godzilla man Ishirô Honda, the director, isn’t able to give them much sense of what he wants. So the prevailing dramatic note is “Will this do?” Richard Jaeckel is enthusiastic, though.

Linda Haynes hasn’t learned yet how to act yet — she’d become an interesting naturalistic low-key player by the time of THE NICKEL RIDE, but at this point she just seems profoundly depressed in her skimpy plastic clothes. She’s meant to be the medical officer but dresses like a dystopian showgirl. She talks carefully, like a drunkard. She has a way of exiting frame, when tasked with an important mission, that signals unambiguously her intent to walk two paces until out of shot and then pause like a mannequin until “Cut!” is called. It’s a very textured performance, is what I’m saying.

Romero and Medina slosh back cocktails for the whole movie. “They must just be permanently pissed,” mused Fiona. I do like the idea of supervillains whose sole motivation is inebriation. There might be a show in that. How else to explain Butch grafting condor wings onto a slumbering lion? It’s the sort of thing we’ve all done, of course, and regretted in the morning.

Godzilla effects guru Eiji Tsuburaya handles the dinky model work, and lays on a super underwater volcano that bursts to the surface in varihued splendour.

Now, look here. Akira Kurosawa considered Ishirô Honda a trusted colleague. The man helmed numerous entertaining fantasies. So we can’t dismiss him. But neither can we consider him to be any damn good. He can cut together various unconvincing special effects to make a coherent, if ludicrous sequence. But he can’t film people getting out of chairs. Not without discombobulating angle shifts. And I know he didn’t design the sets and costumes here but he apparently was content to film them, which does not redound to his credit.

Favourite exchange: when Romero threatens to dissect a scientist’s brain in order to extract his memories, the prof gasps, “That’s impossible!”

“Not for me,” says Romero, with some grandeur. Romero, it must be admitted, knows how to do this shit.

Later, having transplanted his sub captain’s brain into the winged lion, he will ask: “Kuroiga was a fool as a woman, is she also a fool as a griffin?” As damning an inquiry as any I can recall.

Cotten and Butch, left to their own devices by a director focussed on — what, exactly? No man can say! — take diametrically opposed approaches. Cotten takes it all VERY seriously, allowing no trace of camp — looks as if he’s reviewing Salaambo — whereas Cesar R. is high camp throughout, and even gives it a kind of wit. Well, BATMAN is very much relevant experience here, and CITIZEN KANE isn’t.

LATITUDE ZERO contains jetpacks, gold lamé swimwear, a flying lion, bat people, holograms, finger-lasers, brain surgery, tiny flame throwers, a bathysphere, a bath of invulnerability, unwearable costumes, a rockslide, gratuitous trampolining, rodents of unusual size, sliding doors, balconies, a submersible model car; crumbling to dust, skeletons, glass paintings, deadly glitter, explosions, corridors, blinking lights…

The phony lion/flying flunky creates an OZ vibe — Butch’s CCTV screens the equivalent of Margaret Hamilton’s crustal-gazing — confirmed at the end when everyone tries to convince Richard Jaeckel that it was all a dream. “But you were there, and you, and YOU!”

Jaeckel inspects the dailies with dismay.

LATITUDE ZERO stars Hideto Ogata; Jed Leland; Duke Santos; Sheriff Kip McKinney; Betty Thaxter; Golf caddie (uncredited); and Godzilla.

Lubitsch’s Final Touch

Ernst Lubitsch had a sensational end run, with TO BE OR NOT TO BE, HEAVEN CAN WAIT and the less celebrated but easily equal CLUNY BROWN. Before those three is the less stellar THAT UNCERTAIN FEELING, but then you have THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER and NINOTCHKA. The only blots on this celluloid landscape are the Preminger intrusions, A ROYAL SCANDAL, produced and heavily supervised by Lubitsch, and THAT LADY IN ERMINE which Lubitsch began but died before finishing, with Otto Preminger stepping in to complete, uncredited.

A ROYAL SCANDAL isn’t all that bad, and it does have a wonderful moment where William Eythe (of Who the hell is William Eythe? fame) steps out of a tight two-shot with Tallulah Bankhead, paces the room, distracted, and is then surprised to have himself wind up back in a tight two-shot with Tallulah Bankhead, who has nipped round the back of the camera, unseen, and positioned herself in his path. A witty, self-conscious and wonderfully silly use of screen space.

THAT LADY IN ERMINE doesn’t have the benefit of a live Lubitsch to watch over its late production and post-production, and so it’s a lot more uneven. Still, it’s not exactly terrible. Preminger’s broad, ham-fisted approach to comedy (see SKIDOO and Vincent Price’s delicious line, “Otto had the sense of humour of a guillotine,”) pushes through the smooth understatement of Samson Rafaelson’s script, to create a giddy sense of goofiness that doesn’t feel under anybody’s control.

Hard to know if that script would have played markedly better under Lubitsch’s baton, because there’s a prevailing sense of derangement. The movie is a kind of operetta, with a few songs (by Frederick Hollander, so not bad, but not his best) and a Ruritanian setting. So it’s harkening back to Ernst’s early 30s Chevalier productions at Paramount. But, as they say, something new has been added, or several somethings.

First, Technicolor™! While it’s true that the colour in HEAVEN CAN WAIT is a little ugly and adds an unwanted heaviness to the proceedings (20th Century Fox tended to pump up the chroma to almost Goldwynesque levels of vulgar intensity), it really can’t harm such a surefooted and charming work, any more than the sexism and the contortions to get around the censor can. Here, with less ideal circumstances, the colour does hurt, even though it’s cinematographer Leon Shamroy’s trademark golden honey light and cobalt blue shadows, which I usually like. ladled over fairytale kingdoms and dream sequences and Hungarians, it gets a tad gooey.

Then there’s the cast. Lubistch had a genius for getting adept light comedy perfs out of unlikely thesps. Preminger didn’t. Lubitsch knew he could coast along on the sheer surprise of Gary Cooper being funny, and Jack Benny being dramatic (and funny). Here we have Betty Grable, who’s sometimes funny, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. who can play anything, but can’t BE a husky Hungarian warlord. Preminger has good fun with his fatuousness, which Lubitsch might have tamped down. Further down the list, Reginald Gardner returns from CLUNY BROWN as milquetoast cuckold #1, and Cesar Romero plays milquetoast cuckold #2 a little uncertainly, as if he’s not quite sure why his character’s meant to be funny. His presence along with Grable’s recalls Preston Sturges’ THE BEAUTIFUL BLONDE FROM BASHFUL BEND, another late film, the following year, where “Butch” is even more miscast. Fox films had this problem a lot, it seems to me — the contract players got shoehorned into movies they weren’t suited to. Walter Abel is a skilled farceur, and some of the weird innuendo is pleasing — there’s a sense of a sado-masochistic thing going on between Abel and Fairbanks, his superior officer, which is amusing. Plus, gratuitous Harry Davenport.

Betty sings, several times, a song with the lyric “What I’ll do to that wild Hungarian,” and Lubitsch seems very pleased indeed with his double entendre and with his use of the word “Hungarian” as a kind of all-purpose punchline. Or maybe it’s Preminger’s cackles we seem to hear.

A few gruesome cartoony sound effects showcase Otto’s leering comedy style, but mostly the problem is a subtler one of feeling, a sense that nothing is quite right. The story involves not only the fantasy of musical numbers and mythical realms, but paintings coming to life at midnight and a long flashback and a couple of long dream sequences. Double voodoo, and triple voodoo. And the feeling, as with yet another, but far better Sturges late film, UNFAITHFULY YOURS, that if so much of the movie is dream sequences, what’s left for us to take away rom it? (I never felt this really answered the question of what’s wrong with the often-brilliant UNFAITHFULLY, but it was Sturges’ own pet theory.)

Still, as a vaguely Christmassy (at the end) romance about marriage and dreams and fidelity, maybe you could double-bill it with EYES WIDE SHUT (also completed after it’s auteur’s demise, though at least shooting was finished) for a nice festive Fever-Dream Double Feature?

Commingling

Already, after just one FULL day of viewing in Bologna, things are getting blurry. BATMAN: THE MOVIE was one of the last things I saw in Edinburgh, and here comes Cesar Romero, the Joker himself, as a stage-door Johnny in William Wyler’s Sturges-scripted THE GOOD FAIRY (“A lot of early Sturges scripts have only a few recognizably Sturgesian lines, but this one is all Sturges all the time,” is how I pitched it to a fellow patron) and here comes Alfred the butler in MARNIE, screening in an archival Technicolor print. Everything is intermingling.

Also viewed — Mariann Lewinsky introduced her Krazy Serial programme of serial installments from a hundred years ago, saying that she had been urged to commemorate the Futurist manifesto, published right here in Bologna in 1916, but “it’s a terrible document. And the futurists, who took a great deal from cinema, gave nothing back. Whereas the Dadaists, who took nothing from anywhere, gave a great deal back.” So by creating a collage of incomplete serials, she pays homage to Dada and to Krazy Kat, who is also celebrating his centenary.

Jacques Feyder’s LE PIED QUI ÉTREINT (THE CLUTCHING FOOT) is a parody of serials, and specifically THE EXPLOITS OF ELAINE (I know this only because I saw a couple of episodes in Bologna two years ago), with that show’s Clutching Hand replaced by “the man in the green scarf”, a masked figure in an outsize baby carriage, limbs spasming in horrible spasticity, bare feet grasping at convenient props such as the old-fashioned car horn affixed to his perambulator. He’s my new role model.

More on this later, hopefully — it’s the greatest set of nonsense ever assembled.

These disconnected fragments of narrative have been assembled alongside one another to throw up precisely the kind of random connections that make film festivals so confusing — the final stage of this syndrome is when characters from the films seem to appear on the streets, or characters from the streets in the films. I’m not quite there yet, but it’s still early days.