Animinstresly

I followed regular Shadowplayer BrooklynMagus’s recommendation and watched the Forgotten Lady episode of Columbo with John Payne and Janet Leigh, which is lots of fun. Columbo is rousted out of bed so shows up even more rumpled than usual — musical star Leigh has murdered her husband Sam Jaffe (!) because he refused to back her Broadway comeback — Payne is her musical movie co-star who still carries a torch. So it’s another riff on SUNSET BLVD, previously reworked for TV in The Twilight Zone episode The 16mm Shrine (with Ida Lupino).

Presumably Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly were out of reach for the show — Leigh & Payne are good substitutes, they have histories in both musicals and crime films, but not together. So their casting is very apt, and Payne is very good at gazing soulfully at JL. But when Leigh runs her old movies, they can’t come up with any shared footage, so instead we get Leigh solo in WALKING MY BABY BACK HOME, a 1953 musical with Donald O’Connor about Dixieland jazz. I get the impression Universal maybe knew they weren’t going to get any other use out of this film so might as well exploit the less toxic parts here.

The reason the film isn’t revived anymore — the copy I found is ancient — is surely down to the horrible racial elements. The plot requires O’Connor and Leigh to black up for one number, but there seems no pressing reason for Buddy Hackett to impersonate a Chinese waiter with an elastic band stretched round his head and across his eyelids, or for O’Connor to do an athletic but insensitive “oriental” dance number.

One mercy is that Scatman Crothers (billed as Scat Man as if the familiar superhero version of his name would be beneath the movie’s dignity) never shares the frame with a blackface artiste. Some kind of firewall is in place to spare our feelings.

The copy I watched is a spliced-together print seemingly transferred to VHS and thence to digital file, giving it a fuzz that’s been scrubbed clean into a blurry smear. You feel like you’re watching at 4am and you can’t get your eyes in focus, but it doesn’t matter what the actual time is — this is a 4am of the soul. So when the minstrel show unfolds in all its horror, for the first time the white bits around the performers’ eyes read like actual whites of their eyes, cartoonily massive, with tiny mousy black pupils rolling within. Maybe that’s what a real minstrel show looked like from the back row. Here it’s like anime minstrelsy. Animinstrels.

O’Connor’s athletic grace does provide moments of pleasure amid the vaudevillian grotesquerie. But, for the only time I can think of in a classic-era musical number, the movie muffs a transition into song — when the two stars go into their title tune, it has a bizarre WTF quality — we’re an hour in and all the songs previously have been dietetic performances. Suddenly we’re bursting into song and dance in the street, and nothing has prepared us for it. In fact the songs hitherto have denied that this kind of thing can happen. And then we shift to a theatrical set, a stylised Central Park out of a UPA toon so we get a second jolt of unreality. These moments of ineptitude are the film’s saving grace.

Also: O’Connor does a lapdance for Leigh, which is nice, I guess. Lloyd Bacon directs, the vigour of his pre-code days long behind him.

Forgotten Lady stars Mikey; Marion Crane; Dr. Zaius; Gunga Din; Fred Gailey; Moth; Handy Strong; Human Princess; and Cosmo Brown (archive footage).

WALKING MY BABY BACK HOME stars Cosmo Brown; Marion Crane; Tennessee Steinmetz; Rosie Kettle; Hong Kong Fooey; Mrs Miller; George ‘Gramps’ Miller; Ohtao; Paul Jones; Johnny Ringo; and Paul Regret. And who is the aggressive music teacher Madame Grinaldo, played with an inexplicable Russian accent and a lot of comedy skill? She’s uncredited, despite having a scene to herself which is more than Lori Nelson does as the young sister, who has about four lines and is sent out of the room anytime anything is about to happen…?

Dummy Images

Mario Bava’s BLOOD AND BLACK LACE has one of the greatest opening credit sequences ever — greater than anything else in the film, in fact, though the film has magnificent stylistic tour-de-forces throughout. Most of them are killings, and they’re “nakedly sadistic,” to use Kim Newman’s evocative phrase in The BFI Bumper Boy’s Book of Horror Movies or whatever it’s called. The queasily sexual come-on approach to the snuffings rather spoils my pleasure. I think Bava was trying to top PSYCHO, and had analysed the effect of the shower scene accurately, probably, but was mixing things up in a disturbing way.

In PSYCHO, Hitchcock wrong-foots the audience by preferring a suggestion of (unseen) nudity — one “perks up in all manner of ways,” said Jonathan Demme of the prospect of a naked Janet Leigh — though one should also be repulsed by Norman Bates’ peeping, even as Hitch teases us with the prospect of sharing in it. Then any erotic potential is quashed by the brutal slashing.

In BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, the terrorizing of the female victims is given a big, suspenseful but somehow sexually-tinged build-up, the killings are unnecessarily elaborate and exotically varied, and the women always manage to tear their clothing, exposing undergarments. The first murder is particularly striking in the way the victim is dragged off by her feet, so that her skirt is tucked up exposing stocking tops and panties. So the murders are not only sadistic but necrophilic. She may be dead, the movie says, but we can still enjoy looking at her body.

But that kind of discomfort is missing from the opening titles, which I find deeply joyous in their mock-sinister mood-setting. Objectification is still going on, though — the cast are posed like mannequins. Some kind of hierarchy seems to be present: some of the actors get to slyly glance towards us, or offscreen with furtive intent. Eyes and eyelids are the only parts permitted to move. Otherwise, only Bava’s gliding camera is permitted motion, which makes the still thesps seem even more frozen.

This seems like a wry comment on the script’s very basic characterisation, and an acknowledgement that the people we’re going to see hacked up are in no sense real humans — perhaps a reassuring wink to anxious moviegoers, like the hilarious Karloff stuffed horsey-ride at the coda of BLACK SABBATH? But, coming at the head of the film, it has less of a comforting effect — as the stiff mummers set about personating their cardboard characters — the twitchy dope fiend, the throat-clutching “epileptic”, the fake Chinese girl and the fashion boss ice queen — they do acquire a certain limited life, or at least they seem like crudely-sketched avatars of humanity, so to see their deaths served up as pseudo-sexual spectacle still disturbs me.

Funnily enough, the first time I saw the film was on a crappy VHS, so the colour was terrible and the framing was ruined by pan-and-scan, the titles were the US version made by Filmation (who at least tried to mimic a Bava lighting style) and all the murders had been crudely truncated by the BBFC. And the film was still recognizably an amazing piece of tacky but beautiful, nasty but evocative cinema.

Lassie Go Home

So, to delve a little deeper into the career of FORBIDDEN PLANET helmer Fred MacLeod Wilcox I looked at HILLS OF HOME, one of his Lassie sequels — weirdly, it doesn’t have the dog’s name in the title, but takes the word “HOME” from LASSIE COME HOME as if that was a clear enough association.

It’s one of those animal movies where they really struggle to keep the animal at the centre of the story. This is a jumble of incidents from the life of a Scottish country doctor, in fact adapted from a source that has nothing to do with Lassie and may not even have a dog in it for all I know. The idea that a doctor needs a sheepdog assistant is a bit of a stretch, anyway.

Lassie also turns up in Scotland in CHALLENGE TO LASSIE (above), with some of the same co-stars, in which he takes over the story of Greyfriars Bobby. Sheer cultural appropriation, and I’m not talking about Americans (grumpy Richard Thorpe, director) stealing a Scottish tale, but a border collie filching a role from a terrier.

Lassie seems to teleport from story to story, country to country, turning up where he’s needed — his previous owners disappear from film to film, and he magically acquires a whole new backstory. Thinking about it, maybe he’s less like Doctor Who — or K9 in a Terminator style skin-suit — than Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap.

HILLS OF HOME stars Wilcox fave Edmund Gwenn, doing a wretched but consistent Scots accent, Hollywood’s favourite faux-Highlander Donald Crisp doing a better one, and Janet Leigh doing an appalling one that veers west at every opportunity. Still, it’s sort of nice she tried.

Sometimes I’ll watch a dull film to the end for the nostalgic feeling of being a kid in the 70s when nothing good is on TV. Though I would probably have quite liked HILLS OF HOME, and gone “Aww” whenever Lassie is abused, which seems to be the main form of entertainment being sold.

There is absolutely no Scottish location work (unlike in the much grander CHALLENGE), but another chance to enjoy the Scottish/Irish village set showcased in BONNIE SCOTLAND, THE SWORDSMAN, and even MAN IN THE ATTIC where it stands in for London.

Wilcox’s direction remains absolutely competent, absolutely uninspired, but there are no special effects save the odd matte painting, no electronic tonalities, and no invisible monsters, or none that I could see.