I already tweeted about this, but what the hey, slow news day after the fuss and excitement of PUBLISHING A NOVEL. I will be mentioning that fact fairly often but it won’t get in the way too much,
Rewatched CAT PEOPLE and was struck for the first time by the way the chair behind Simon Simon (above) casts the shadow of a cat’s head, particularly MY cat’s head (Momo has funny small ears).
Whenever looking at these things and wondering if they’re deliberate, it’s best to consider that, even if the filmmakers had to shoot quickly, they usually had a bit of time to think about their effects, and there were a number of heads thinking about each department, so most things of this kind probably are intentional. But it doesn’t really matter, we can enjoy them either way.
Now seems an appropriate time to mention all the Val Lewton-themed limericks I’ve been writing at Limerwrecks, like THIS ONE.
One of our watch party gang requested westerns, and another didn’t like westerns, so I tried to find two westerns that weren’t.
Jacques Tourneur’s STARS IN MY CROWN is set in a small western town but doesn’t really have any of the expected action and Joel McCrea plays a parson. It’s wonderful, though.
WINCHESTER ’73 is pretty much a pure western but it’s wall-to-wall film noir people. Anthony Mann, Shelley Winters, Dan Duryea. Seeing it on my little b&&w portable as a youngster was a decisive cinephile moment, I don’t know why. But I was immediately taken with Duryea.
I guess you could say these films offer contrasting visions of America. STARS is pretty timely, actually: McCrea considers his work so important he continues going door to door after his young ward comes down with typhus, and there’s reason to suspect he could be a super-spreader. McCrea comes to see this as a mistake — the film eventually lets him off the hook, rather, but it’s an interesting point.
Little Dean Stockwell complains of the quarantine lockdown — “It’s like we’re all in jail only we ain’t done nuthin’.”
Then there are these guys. I wish they didn’t seem equally timely.
I remembered McCrea’s great scene facing down the Klan armed only with a couple sheets of paper, to save Juano Hernandez from the noose. I’d forgotten it was the climax, but of course, how could they top it?
STARS gives the lie to the idea that a western can tell any kind of story. I don’t think it can tell a pacifist one. McCrea’s preacher has been a soldier, but he isn’t about to strap on his guns again, and so it never feels like SHANE or something, where the moment may be deferred, but is inevitably coming. So we have a film with all the accoutrements of a western, the period and the Americana, but we just can’t call it one.
WINCHESTER ’73, as the title implies, is one of the most gun-obsessed westerns ever made. Not the rootin’-tootin’est, but possibly the shootin’est. But at least it has an interesting female character. Mann’s westerns usually did. Unlike Ford he didn’t primarily regard women as homemakers…
It turns out to be an almost biblical tale of blood vengeance, and I realise now that not only is Duryea scary and crazy, but very hep and modern. And he can wheedle arrogantly, which is some trick. When he’s identified as the fastest gun in Texas, he wheedles, “Texas? Baby, why limit me?” Also, he’s the only person in the film who seems to be having a good time.
STARS IN MY CROWN stars John L. Sullivan; Sofia de Peralta-Reavis ‘The Baroness’; Doctor Wellington Yueh; Little John; Nayland Smith; Duke Harris; Miss Robin Crusoe; Lucas Beauchamp; Homer Higgins; Juror 10; Butch Cassidy; ‘Dum-Dum’ Clarke; Col. Edward Carruthers; ‘The Thing’; and Pee Wee.
WINCHESTER ’73 stars John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson; Charlotte Haze; Duke Pastrami; Sheriff Al Chambers; Senate Minority Leader; Marvin Unger; Jordan ‘Bick’ Benedict Jr.; ‘Teddy Roosevelt’ Brewster; Chota; and Sidney Falco.
A very young, very fat Cecil Parker was a highlight in BECKY SHARP, he injects life into UNDER CAPRICORN (which we missed) and accompanies Ingrid Bergman again in Stanley Donen’s INDISCREET, where he gets most of the laughs during the long first half of setting-up. Then there’s some business with a fellow named Cary Grant — and then David Kossoff, of all people, got a spontaneous round of applause from the Bologna audience — TWICE. For entering and exiting.
That was today, when I had a lie in. Yesterday I saw:
IN OLD CHICAGO (Henry King) and WAY OF A GAUCHO (Jacques Tourneur) in the morning, two films in which cows cause death. In the Tourneur, a startling matte effect enables a horse and rider to disappear under a stampeded of cattle. The King is like a bovine version of THE BIRDS, with Mrs. O’Leary’s cow incinerating the windy city single-hooved, and a herd busting out from the stockyards to trample a major character.
The Tourneur, which looks great but was not a major hit with the public here, did feature the festival’s most quoted line: “He’s a fool, but he’s very gaucho.”
My own favourite exchange was from MOULIN ROUGE. Zsa Zsa: “Others find love and happiness, I find only disenchantment.” “Jose: “But you find it so often.”
I walked out of THE SEA WOLF — not the Curtiz classic, but an earlier Fox version by the worthless Alfred Santell. I would have stuck it out but my foot needed ointment so I stuck that out instead. Then I interviewed a very special person — haven’t been able to check the audio yet so we’ll have to see about that…
Fiona stayed in the Cinema Jolly, whose air-con has shown the most distinguished service this fest, until today when it let us all down rather badly during THE BRAVADOS, and she saw Felix E. Feist’s TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY. I’m going to have to catch up with the Feists I missed after the fest. He seems feisty.
The Piazetta Pier Paolo Pasolini is where showings are held with the carbon arc projector in the open air, so at 10.15 pm we ingested an Aperol Spritz (me) and a peach juice (Fiona) and washed them down with a one-reel fragment of Rupert Julian’s CREAKING STAIRS — the stairs weren’t all that creaked — a tinted Fleischer OUT OF THE INKWELL cartoon, a couple of travelogue-type things, and best of all, three episodes of ZIGOMAR PEAU D’ANGUILLE, a proto-FANTOMAS serial with a chunky master-criminal, a slinky female sidekick in a catsuit, and various capers including a robbery using an elephant accomplice (“La Rosaria” whispering detail directions into the pachyderm’s massive ear — intertitle ZIGOMAR AND LA ROSARIA WAIT IN THE GUTTER FOR THE ELEPHANT) and dive-bombing on Lake Como.
I’d been wanting to properly see some ZIGOMAR since I saw my first clip of the hooded desperado, possibly in the BBC series The Last Machine. He did not disappoint me, though most of his heists seemed to leave him out of pocket.
