The Sunday Intertitle: Bad Vats and Jeroboams

There are TWO intertitles in Kevin Allen’s new film of UNDER MILK WOOD, screened at EIFF in advance of its general release this autumn. Sadly, I don’t have a copy of the film to frame-grab these from, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. And I can’t remember exactly what they say. The Fest is becoming blurry.

As is the film — frequent smearings of digital vaseline to rub the image into a glassy glaze, along with multiple other tricks and tics — it’s a hugely resourceful film, visually, as it needs to be. The challenge of matching pictures to Dylan Thomas’ “Play for Voices” which don’t overwhelm the text or blandly illustrate it must have been daunting. Allen, who reports that he spent the intervening decade since his last feature working on a pig farm, seems to have grown immensely in stature as a director — this was a proper Ken Russell phantasmagoria.

Allen burst on the scene with TWIN TOWN, producer Andrew MacDonald’s follow-up to TRAINSPOTTING, which I think suffered from the sense of letdown that it wasn’t as assured and entertaining as its predecessor — but it did give us Rhys Ifans. Ifans, who seems to be in every film in the Fest, is back here as both First Voice and Captain Cat Complimenting his Jekyll-Hyde dual role in THE MARRIAGE OF REASON & SQUALOR), along with the estimable Charlotte Church, all lusty smile and lascivious jiggle as Polly Garter.

Allen decided to treat the film as ALL DREAM, with scenes flowing together and surreal and bawdy rupturings of reality pushing through at every turn. It’s frequently delirious and only occasionally deleterious — when what the text calls a “shaving glass” is represented by a wall mirror in a shop, I couldn’t see what was gained by the mismatch. And maybe there are too many phalluses. But it’s all livelier and more evocative than the earlier Richard Burton job, I think. In that one, the line “circling her nipples with lipstick” is illustrated by a busty wench drawing rings round the outside margins of her bosoms, as if about to turn them into pink-nosed smiley faces. Allen persistently seems to have a better idea of what Thomas was on about, and aided by Mark Thomas’ epic, sumptuous score and Andy Hollis’ gorgeous photography, has created something rather intoxicating.

Things I Bought in Toronto

At the Hollywood Canteen movie bookstore, my guide to the fair city of Toronto, Milos Tolmin, strikes a dramatic pose. He also tweets as @HogtownSerb — I suggest you follow him.

Hollywood Canteen is like paradise to me, but the prices are reasonable, and as a Scotsman that distresses me. So regretfully I only purchased —

Each Man in His Time, the autobiography of Raoul Walsh, which I didn’t even know existed. Never seen a copy. You just know Uncle Raoul is going to have some good stories!

Raoul as Pancho Villa. (Ladies! Restrain yourselves!)

Three More Screenplays by Preston Sturges. These volumes are always expensive, so to find one at a reasonable price was a welcome surprise. This one contains scripts for THE POWER AND THE GLORY, EASY LIVING and REMEMBER THE NIGHT, films wholly written by P.S. but which he did not direct, so I expect the variations from page to screen will be illuminating. Who wants to read a script that feels like a transcript of the finished film?

Despite what you might see as my restraint in Hollywood Canteen, I did actually go berserk in Toronto’s used bookstores (w hich are in decline thanks to the internet, but still impressed me mightily). BMV books on Bloor Street, just five minutes from my hotel, has a great assortment of film books in the basement, at knockdown prices, so you could hardly expect me to leave without an assortment of literature that threatened to break small bones in my feet every time I hoisted my luggage. I came away with —

Directors in ACTION Selections from ACTION the Official Magazine of the Directors Guild of America Edited by Bob Thomas. This 1973 collection features interviews with Richard Lester (the clincher), Kubrick, Frankenheimer, Corman, Siegel, Altman, Ford, Hitchcock, Peckinpah, Friedkin, Ashby, Gordon Parks, George Stevens, Mel Brooks and Michael Ritchie.

Screenwriter: Words Become Pictures by Lee Server. I’ve read too many screenwriting books, in search of the non-existent secret of success, but I love interviews with screenwriters (often more articulate and more amusingly embittered than directors or stars) and this one profiles such luminaries and subluminaries as Charles Bennett, A.I. Bezzerides, Allan Scott and Curt Siodmak. I bet I can get some good quotes from it for here.

An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood by Neal Gabler. As guest of th Toronto  Jewish FIlm Festival in company with NATAN, I felt I should. It looks great!

Secret Lives of the Great Filmmakers by Robert Schnakenberg, illustrated by Mario Zucca. Gossip — fairly scrupulously presented, so much of it is likely true. I figured Fiona would enjoy this one along with me.

Film Scripts Four. This one collects A HARD DAY’S NIGHT, DARLING and THE BEST MAN. $4.90 = just over £2, and believe it or not I hesitated, mindful of my baggage allowance.

The Platinum Years, photographs by Bob Willoughby (text by Richard Schickel, whose The Disney Version I was much tempted by). This great doorstop coffee table book of on-set stills from late sixties Hollywood productions is the biggest item I came away with, but was still only $9.91, an odd price but a more-than-fair one. Seduced by the favourable exchange rate and Richard Lester’s persona recommendation (he thought the PETULIA pics the best ever taken on one of his sets), I lugged it home.

Dylan Thomas The Complete Screenplays. The script of THE DOCTOR AND THE DEVILS taught me more craft than Robert McKee ever could, so I’m anxious to try the rest. I have seen and enjoyed the rare THREE WEIRD SISTERS and NO ROOM AT THE INN so a script comparison should be interesting. TD&TD has been unsuccessfully filmed, twice, once by a late friend of Milos.

Milos insisted I should get something Canadian, and bought me, over my spluttered protests, a study of Bruce MacDonald’s HARDCORE LOGO, a film I’ve been meaning to see. I interviewed Mr. MacDonald at the time of PONTYPOOL and found him as appealing as his movie.

At a few other stores, I supplemented my (barely) mobile book repository with —

KOPS AND CUSTARDS The Legend of Keystone Films (A BOOK) by Kalton C. Lahue and Terry Brewer. Am particularly interested because of current researches into Mabel Normand, and I couldn’t resist a book with that parenthesis, or with this sentence inside: “Joe Jackson was an inveterate joker, who worked almost exclusively with electricity.”

An Illustrated History of the Horror Film, by Carlos Clarens. Based on his appearance in Agnes Varda’s LION’S LOVE, I would nominate Mr. Clarens as cinema’s cutest critic, but what drew me most was this image from THE WIZARD, a lost film from 1927. George Kotsonaros and Gustaf Von Seyffertitz.

Trap for Cinderella by Sebastien Japrisot, a French novelist of mainly crime fiction, all of whose novels have been filmed.

I also rather wish I’d bought a book collecting articles from Image, just for a rather moody photo of Joe Martin. Mr Martin was that unusual person, an orangutan movie star, though he was often credited as “Joe Martin the Chimp.” I’d never heard of him, but it turns out I’d seen him, opposite Max Linder in SEVEN YEARS BAD LUCK. In THE ADVENTURES OF TARZAN, the IMDb has him credited as “Man in Ape Suit,” which confuses me as he#s definitely the real deal. Does the film feature a man in an ape suit played by a real ape? If so, it is boldly reversing Hollywood tradition.

Read Joe’s bio here! (Caution: it is a deeply horrible, tragic story. It has so many elements of Poe I really hope it isn’t true.)

“Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up sniffing glue…”

Lloyd Bridges in THIRD PARTY RISK.

A very middling thriller: two-fisted lyricist Lloyd is distracted from recording Spanish folk tunes by a plot involving compromising showgirl letters, industrial secrets, and Finlay Currie as the world’s least convincing Hungarian. The whole thing is goofily enjoyable like an episode of The Saint accidentally inflated to feature length. Ferdy Mayne and Roger Delgado add swarthiness and suavity.

Director Daniel Birt seems quite bored with it all, adding to my half-baked theory about British cinema — there were periods, notably the late forties and mid-sixties, when the quality produced by the best filmmakers was so high, it raised the overall standard. Moderately gifted directors couldn’t help but be inspired by the startling stuff around them, and raised their game accordingly. Birt’s films in 1948 (the climactic year of that boom), co-written by Dylan Thomas, are almost startlingly good. THE THREE WEIRD SISTERS (his first film, Nova Pilbeam’s last) and NO ROOM AT THE INN have Gothic panache and very modern flourishes, as well as controversial church-bashing and subversive morbidity, but just six years later he’s directing with one eye on oblivion. What happened to him, or rather, what happened to British filmmaking?

The question is raised over at The Daily Notebook in this week’s The Forgotten.