Tried to make me go to Ahab

Bits of John Huston’s MOBY DICK had Fiona’s jaw hanging open. If you could only reach into the screen, peal Gregory Peck’s image off it and replace him with someone else — Walter Huston would be right if his son had made it earlier — John himself would have been excellent, and you can see Peck straining to give Hustonian line readings — and one can imagine other leading men of the period being terrific — Robert Ryan was born to it (see BILLY BUDD), Trevor Howard could have nailed it, Robert Mitchum would have done something really surprising. Sterling Hayden had already worked with Huston so I can’t understand why he wasn’t thought of. Peck is certainly trying, but it’s a matter of essence, not just skill or willingness. And Peck’s essence is stiffness. “They’ve given him a nose and a scar and a wooden leg and he still can’t do anything!” declared a friend. He works himself into a suitable pitch, he takes risks, and none of it is particularly convincing or effective.

Maybe some of it is physiognomic: they glued on a fresh nose, but they can’t conceal the sensuous lips, which tend to look petulant rather than fierce.

However, this lack at the film’s centre seems to energize Huston — his blocking becomes both ornate and muscular, the build-up given to Peck’s appearance as Ahab is tremendous, and Philip Sainton’s score really gives it the hard sell — tragic that he never scored another film (apparently he was scheduled to do A KING IN NEW YORK, but quit, perhaps not wishing to merely transcribe his director’s humming.

Ossie Morris’s b&w/colour hybrid cinematography is consistently striking, and the whole thing has a visceral, weighty quality that even survives the unavoidable model shots — editor Russell Lloyd became a regular Huston collaborator after skillfully intercutting real whales, life-sized replicas, men and boats at sea and in the studio tank, and model shots completed months after principal photography, flicking from one to the other with such energy that the reality shifts are almost seamless. FX wise, it’s a weird case of the whale being impressive without being convincing; this at least places it a notch higher than Bruce the shark in JAWS who is neither. I mean, you know it can’t have been easy, but your hat remains on your head.

Richard Basehart is good — not too interesting, which seems right for the cypher-like Ishmael. A younger actor might have been more “right,” but Basehart being the wrong type adds the right kind of interest. His speech also has a Huston-like quality, and in Joe Losey’s FINGER OF GUILT the same year, he delivers cinema’s first full-on Huston impersonation, anticipating Clint Eastwood in WHITE HUNTER, BLACK HEART and Daniel Day-Lewis in THERE WILL BE BLOOD. Best in show: Harry Andrews, who implausibly just seems to BE his hearty whaler character, and Leo Genn’s pensive Starbuck who can make underplaying hit hard.

An 8/10ths masterpiece. The Hollywood Gold Series Blu Ray delivers solid picture values (much better than the DVD used for these images).

MOBY DICK stars Atticus Finch, Ivan Karamazov, Sir Clifford Chatterley, Sir Lancelot Spratt, the 13th Earl of Gurney, Joe Gargery, Bob Cratchit, Tom Fury, Charles Foster Kane and the voice of the Lawgiver.

Tentacular Spectacular

Words cannot express the sheer clammy grip of 1919 serial entertainment TRAIL OF THE OCTOPUS!

But I’ll try.

We begin in the desert — not perhaps the most fitting location for an octopus, but the serial has 300 minutes to run so we can afford to take it gently. Not that we do! Immediately, two scientists stumble upon “the Ancient Egyptian Temple of Death” — they seem curiously pleased at this. “It was not a myth!” declares the more fervid of the two.

While the archaeologists are pottering within, their native bearers — who are all black — are set upon by rapacious Arabs — cue close-up of one poor chap being lightly tapped on the brow with a rifle butt. The racial politics are made clear — black people make good servants, but Arabs are untrustworthy and will tap you on the cranium with their rifles if given a free hand.

Meanwhile, the shifty archaeologist tries to kill the fervid one after reading the inscription pertaining to the Idol of Death — a figurine depicting a bashful elephant — and we get what may be the most remarkable intertitle of 1919 —

Not only is it spelled out in hieroglyphs, but it’s accompanied by a garter snake. Of course Egyptian temples are constantly a-slither with snakes, as we know from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. What the poor things feed on is anybody’s guess. Perhaps the lack of vittles explains why they always looks so thin.

The movie provides its own translation of this sacred text, but I think we should get Kristin Thompson to work on it, then we can compare both versions and see who is the best Egyptologist, Thompson or J. Grubb Alexander.

Anyhow, something or other happens and it turns out this is all a story being told by the fervid chap, now well stricken in years, to his anxious daughter. There’s some kind of nonsense about eight ceremonial daggers which open a stone vault, but the charming domestic scene keeps getting interrupted by STARING EYES ~

Well, you can see how that might cause you to lose the thread of the conversation. What with being under an Egyptian curse and all, the Professor is concerned, and his daughter fortunately remembers that Carter Holmes, world-renowned criminologist, lives next door (with his Scottish lieutenant, Sandy McNab) and ventures forth to get him.

Now things get really interesting — while she’s gone, disturbing Mr Holmes amid his test tubes, pops is knifed to death by a masked assailant, but the bit of film this occurred in is now missing. I suspect a conspiracy. The “reconstruction” of the missing footage consists of random, Jesus Franco type zoom-ins on freeze frames, explanatory titles, and constant cutaways to the staring eyes. Oh, and a bit of CGI lens flare is added to one shot. It’s a magnificent job, arguably improving on the original sequence, although naturally that’s hard to be definite about since it’s missing.

Anyhow, the girl fetches Holmes, and there’s an odd bit involving a mysterious voice which whispers A-B-E-F-A-C-E at him. In such a situation, you or I might blunder badly by trying to locate the source of the voice, but our Carter, who may well be schizophrenic, accepts it as a given and merely tries to interpret its gnomic utterance. This leads him to a portrait of Lincoln on the wall which he cheerfully mutilates, obtaining a valuable clew for his troubles.

Then he has a punch-up with the masked fellow, later identified as Monsieur X. No pushover, Carter knocks X out a window — but the bounder vanishes from the sidewalk like Michael Myers at the end of HALLOWEEN. Then the girl is kidnapped. Then Carter gets a note telling him to report to 33 Folsom Street by midnight or else she’ll be killed. Then he goes there and sees the staring eyes floating out of the wallpaper. Then sinister hands reach through the wall behind him clutching irons gyves. Then we see the girl, facing sacrifice at the hands of a mysterious sect  ~

Clearly, TRAIL OF THE OCTOPUS is some kind of demented masterpiece and I have to watch all five hours of it or else I’ll never sleep again. Clearly I’m going to dole it out on a weekly basis as I did with THE MASTER MYSTERY, thus duplicating the authentic movie serial experience.

Director Duke Worne, a former B-list actor, was making his debut here, and he does a fine job, eliciting the required hambone performances and keeping the pace frantic and the action lurid. A shame the cinematographer isn’t credited, as there’s fine atmospheric work going on, and the design, though still relying on hand-painted flats some of the time, is exotic and atmospheric (there’s even a close-up of a dagger which is a painting, for some reason).

Screenwriter J. Grubb Alexander, apparently making the stuff up as he goes along, seems like a real Pat Hobby character, churning out silent thrillers and then foundering somewhat in the talkie era — his most famous credit there is the universally deplored (yet strangely loved) John Barrymore MOBY DICK, the one which adds romantic interest and pre-code dirty jokes. He also wrote for Barrymore on SVENGALI and THE MAD GENIUS, evincing a fine gift for inappropriate comic relief. His tone seems more surefooted in THE TRAIL OF THE OCTOPUS.

I hope you’ll join me next week for the next exciting episode. See You Next Wednesday!

Cosmic Ray

Ray Bradbury is, of course, irreplaceable. Nobody in science fiction or in literature can occupy the place he held.

In the cinema, things are more problematic. I recall an essay by Harlan Ellison where he addressed R.B.’s patchy record of screen adaptations, arguing that Bradbury’s dialogue, like Hemingway’s, is designed to be read, not spoken, and sounds weird coming from the lips of an actor in a scene. He might have been talking of himself (or Clive Barker, for that matter). We could get into a debate about which of these authors writes great dialogue which is just too literary to perform, and which writes purple, gaudy stuff that is sometimes a little too rich even for the page, but never mind.

Rod Steiger liked to camouflage himself nude on people’s couches in hopes they’d sit on him. Creepy.

Being rather familiar with Truffaut’s FAHRENHEIT 451 (a little patchy, I think, but with a great Herrmann score and one of the  most beautiful endings of any film), SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES (flawed but seriously underrated, and I ought to treat it to a Forgotten round about Halloween), and MOBY DICK, scripted by Bradbury for John Huston, who did a great job except for the styrofoam cetacean and the balsa Ahab, being as I say rather familiar with those, we elected to watch THE ILLUSTRATED MAN, which I’d never previously been able to sit through, and The Martian Chronicles mini-series which I don’t think I’d watched since it first aired.

Both movies are based on novels which are really short story collections, things which grew organically without the usual diagrams. Of course, the slide rule and shoehorn and bacon slicer have all been deployed to hew them into some kind of cinematic shape. Jack Smight’s film of THE ILLUSTRATED MAN put me off as a youngster by being slow, ponderous and kind of depressive.

The movie stars Rod Steiger, who suffered from depression for real, but we can’t blame him for the film’s tone, he attacks his role with typical ferocity. (If you want to see Steiger acting while in the midst of depression — I can’t think why you would, but I’ll mention it anyway — see John Hough’s AMERICAN GOTHIC aka HIDE AND SHRIEK, where he can barely bring himself to mumble his lines. Very sad.) Jerry Goldsmith’s score is elegiac and lovely, but maybe a little lacking in forward thrust. But it’s the script and direction which really drag. In cutting Bradbury’s collection of tales down to three, screenwriter Howard Kreitsek forces each episode to hang about too long, turning them into turgid mood pieces when many of them are snappy potboilers on the page, pulp nasties with plenty of poetic ambition but one foot solidly in cheap thrills. The Veldt is basically a sci-fi twist on an EC horror story. But in the reverential treatment trowelled on by Smight and Kreitsek, everything is drawn-out, ponderous and aching with Significance. The other two stories become kind of pointless in the distorted form presented, although the planet where it always rains is beautifully designed, and shows that Douglas Adams was right to say that a towel is a useful thing to have in space.

Rod Steiger rocking the Ricky Gervaise look.

The exception is the framing structure, which peters out at the end with a crap zoom on a dusty road, but for much of the time is quirky, edgy, and a-quiver with a kind of homo-erotic menace I don’t recall in the book. Steiger is excellent here, with his dog in a bag (a Pomeranian named Peke), and Robert Drivas matches him in fervid intensity. The 30s atmosphere is rather besmirched by Claire Bloom’s very 1969 hair and makeup (did production designers not get driven to DESPAIR by the haircuts and cosmetics inflicted in those days? — I’m sure it’s just my imagination telling me Julie Christie wears white lipstick in DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, but I swear it’s not far off) but otherwise this is lovely stuff. Somebody film some more Bradbury stories, replace the ones in here, and you’d be onto something.

The Martian Chronicles suffers more severe flaws, but is a lot more watchable, thanks to a comparatively nippy pace, a greater variety of schtick, and some enjoyable hams. Top marks to Stanley Myers for his epic mood stuff, deduct two points for the disco theme tune (VERY catchy though it is), and great credit to Assheton Gorton (BLOW-UP) for his production design. The rocketships are naff (Bradbury himself called them “flying phalluses”) and a few other elements are laughable, but the obelisks and pyramids constructed in Malta and Lanzarotte are striking and actually convincing, despite the fact that everything’s decorative, nothing’s functional.

Michael Anderson (DAMBUSTERS), a former AD to Asquith, production manager to Lean, is a prose artist rather than a poet, which is actually good from a story point of view. He can’t smother everything in damned reverence because he doesn’t know what it is. He doesn’t have the taste to avoid NASA stock footage and redundant miniatures docking in space which aspire to 2001 but land squarely in the key of Thunderbirds, but he dishes up the yarns in a no-nonsense way.

“They left out the magic. They left out the part that was Bradbury,” complained sci-fi scribe David Gerrold (and he should know: he created the Tribbles), but this is not wholly true. Each episode (three ninety-minute blockbusters with three stories loosely linked in each) hits at least one moment of the uncanny, maybe because each Bradbury story has at its heart a little something that IS purely cinematic. He was too much of a cinephile not to put that in, and screenwriter Richard Matheson is too shrewd a dramatist to miss those moments.

So in the adaptation of Mars is Heaven!, Anthony Pullen-Shaw is good and eerie when he suddenly admits to not being Commander Black’s brother, after all — and Anderson has remembered how effective Joseph Cotten’s turn to camera in close-up was in SHADOW OF A DOUBT, another tale of a murderous family intruder with telepathy in Thornton Wilder land.

This is not my beautiful house from David Cairns on Vimeo.

And in what was once And the Moon Be Still as Bright, there’s a great bit by Bernie Casey as the astronaut who goes native —

The Last Martian from David Cairns on Vimeo.

Casey has immense authority, a rich voice, and a great way of seeming to throw away lines while really turning them to catch the light, although much of the time here he doesn’t seem to have learned those lines too well, which he covers up by gesturing in a stylized manner. But with this speech he knows he’s got something a little immortal, and he nails it.