Essay Time

Essays by other people. The magical appearance of The Community Bookshop on my nearest main thoroughfare (Great Junction Street) has affected me much as the brief flowering of the All-You-Can Eat Bookshop slightly further away on Ferry Road did — I go in and feel obliged to buy something, and it leads to me picking up things I might not otherwise have tried.

There’s almost never anything worth getting in TCB’s film section, but it has everything else a growing boy needs. I picked up Tom Robbins’ Wild Ducks Flying Backwards, a collection of the novelist’s short writings, and will now be seeking out his longer works. This one, in an ode to Leonard Cohen, produces the finest poetic image I’ve ever read, in a completely throwaway fashion:

“Now, thirty years later, as society staggers towards the millennium, flailing and screeching all the while, like an orangutan with a steak knife in its side […]”

A grisly, hilarious image that imposes itself on the mind’s eye and also still seems like THE image for our times, almost another thirty years on.

Robbins includes panegyrics to Diane Keaton (“a kachina, a wondernik, a jill-o’-lantern”) Jennifer Jason Leigh (“I want to tell you about the Lizard Queen.”), Debra Winger (“She’s walked a tightrope between fire and honey.”) and the films of Alan Rudolph (“Horizontal layers of lust and angst crisscross with vertical layers of wit and beauty.”)

Terrific, terrific.

I’m an unfaithful follower of the wrings of Todd McEwen, who lives in Edinburgh but whom I have never knowingly met. How Not To Be American is a bunch of essays not so much loosely as falsely grouped, though I guess everything in there has something to do with than unwieldy continent. There’s a nice appreciation of HARVEY, in which all the comments apply equally to the film and the source play, but the one that wowed me is Cary Grant’s Suit, which views NORTH BY NORTHWEST from the standpoint of Grant’s grey Madison Ave. attire, once voted the finest suit in film history. McEwen views the suit as a kind of superhero, invulnerable and godlike, and Grant’s heroic quest is to be worthy of it. The suit starts the film empty, with Grant as a vapid streak of hype occupying it undeservingly — by the end he has shown the right stuff and after losing both suit and girl, gets them back in the much-celebrated final scene transition.

Imaginative, funny, and mostly completely CORRECT. He’s not reaching here, about everything he says is accurate and insightful and opens up the movie in fresh ways, even though the movie and the suit have invited a great deal of commentary.

There’s a bit about Godzilla coming up and also a chapter proposing how to film unfilmable books, with suggested cast and crew, eg.

Civilisation and its Discontents 1940 dr. Rene Clair. Fred MacMurray, Greta Garbo, Robert Benchley (as Jung). A timid European doctor is haunted by his own penis.

But I haven’t read those bits yet.

Granta 86, the film edition, is the odd one out, since it came from a charity shop in Stockbridge. They had a stack of Grantas and were selling them at £1 each. I’ll buy almost anything for a quid so I grabbed this one. Some of the literary types weighing in on an alien medium are not as enlightening or amusing as Robbins and McEwen, but Karl French produces a section on Art by Directors, featuring Hitchcock prep sketches, Kurosawa painting-storyboards, Takeshi Kitano’s fun canvases, Mike Figgis’ photographs and sketches, Satyajit Ray’s really gorgeous art in various media, Greenaway abstracts and John Huston paintings and sketches, finishing up with Scorsese’s childish storyboards which don’t really belong in such august company. They’re undoubtedly useful for MS, and so we can be glad of their existence, but it puzzles me that he doesn’t even draw in the right aspect ratio. Never mind the human figures (carefully shaded, blindly staring dwarfs), he can’t draw the right rectangle.

But, as Kurosawa put it, explaining his weakness as a self-pitying golfer, “It is enough for a person to be good at one thing.”

The best article, of those I’ve read, is Atom Egoyan’s Dr. Gonad, documenting the career of Paul Thomas, who played Peter in JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR, then went on to act in and/or direct over three hundred pornos. it’s an amusing piece, even if most of the hilarity comes from simply naming the films Thomas has been mixed up in. Beautifully structured, too, reminding me that Egoyan used to be quite good at structure.

The piece really calls out for a sequel, though, in which Thomas would consider Egoyan’s equally skew-whiff career (or, as we Scots sometimes say, squee-hook). Whereas Egoyan simply quotes from the Thomas filmography and pseudonyms, and that’s enough to get the laughs, Thomas would have to actually sit through WHERE THE TRUTH LIES and CHLOE. Since I assume he earns a decent living doing what he does, nobody’s likely to be able to pay him enough to consume the Armenian-Canadian eroticist’s oeuvre.

Trapped in the Turret

“Trapped in the Turret” is a wonderfully lame title for the penultimate episode of FLASH GORDON. Some sense of escalation, of final doom to be averted, is presumably desirable at this point, but instead we have a description of an inconvenience.

I looked up the actor who plays “Commander Torch,” Ming’s earthbound (or mongobound) flying monkey. Earl Askam seems, in his armour and with his kidney-bean torso, like an actor who would play an unsympathetic cop in a Laurel & Hardy short, if Edgar Kennedy was preoccupied. Instead, of course, he was a B-western fixture. He died just a few years after making this, from a Bing Crosby-anticipating golf course heart attack, while playing fellow western star Kermit Maynard. Earl was also a trained opera singer, a talent I wish this serial had exploited.

Flash rushes to Dale’s aid, and his differently-shaped stunt double has an enjoyable rollabout with the playful tiger fearsome tigron, as Dale and her stunt double take turns watching in terror. Ming, in turn, watches on Zoom.

The closeups of Larry “Buster” Crabbe wrestling a stuffed cat corpse are tastefully interpolated — the trick is inherently obvious, but never becomes comically obvious the way it is in many more expensive productions. Flash uses his main talent — strangling — no doubt acquired on the polo field — to subdue the ravenous taxidermy exhibit.

“The sacred tigron has been killed!” gasps the Indian temple maiden. Flash Gordon, visiting district iconoclast, strikes again. Mongo will be an entirely profane planet by the time he’s got through strangling everything.

Prince Barin converts Aura to the cause by pointing out that arranging for Dale’s devouring is unlikely to win Flash’s love. “I shall intercede with my father the emperor,” she says, which depending on your reading is either bragging (my son, the lawyer) or exposition above and beyond the call of duty (it’s a big building with doctors in it, but that’s not important right now).

The wide shot of Ming’s palace is really lovely, even if it does have a big hair growing out of it in the frame I’ve selected.

Commander Torch (is he backed up by Sergeant Screwdriver, Corporal Sliderule and Private Flyspray?) belatedly remembers he has a firearm and subdues Vultan and Zarkov, aiming directly at the pretty flower on Frank “knobbly knees” Shannon’s onesie. Ming demands that Flash be found, “visible or not.” At which point, Flash and chums enter the throne room. And Ming STILL doesn’t look happy. He and Zarkov really ought to be friends, they have so much in common: both seem depressed and sullen about their lot in life , the clothes they have to wear, the words they’re expected to say.

Ming is immediately held hostage, his armed guards somehow powerless against Barin’s sword and Flash’s disapproving attitude. Aura, whose character arc resembles a crazy straw, has not only joined the forces of good, she’s SETTLED — accepting passively the meaty love of Barin. Ming promises the earthfolks can return to their “sphere” — but he does it while making Mr Burns-type evil finger movements. We discover he has a henchman called “Officer Ego.”

One is used to these stories being tales of foreign intervention, so the willingness of all concerned to leave Ming in charge, with no guarantee he won’t threaten the earth again, is baffling.

I’m struck by the fact that I found Vultan to be a fun character when I was a kid, whereas it’s now abundantly clear that he’s as dangerous as Ming, crazier by far, and has the mind of a three-year-old. Mike Hodges told me that he saw his FG as a satire on American interventionism, with the bounding idiot Flash (shades of Lang’s Siegfried) smashing the state without understanding anything that’s going on. I suggested there should have been a sequel where Mongo falls to pieces without its dictator, like a post-Tito Yugoslavia. He chuckled.

The non-interventionist Flash we see here, obeying some unstated Prime Directive issued to polo players on the off-chance of interplanetary entanglements, perhaps echoes American foreign policy circa 1936, explaining that late entry into WWII, whereas 1980 Flash is consistent with a new era.

The earthfolks and their buddies load “power units” onto Zarkov’s rocket, intent on visiting Vultan’s city for no clear reason. Commander Torch and his bitches watch warily.

First mention of the turret! “I am to meet the others at the turret-house, by the lake of rocks,” says Barin. I very much want to see this “lake of rocks.” I wonder if it’s a sacred lake of rocks? Or just regular.

Due to popular demand, director Frederick Stephani shows us the iguanas again. They watch Zarkov’s rocketship buzz overhead, licking their dry lips, and it is amusing to speculate what they might be thinking. Perhaps they are anticipating their appearance in an 80s surrealist cigarette commercial. Perhaps they are looking back on their acquaintanceship with that nice Mr. Darwin. One opens his maw to give throat to a fearsome cock-crow — apparently in valediction to the departing earthpeople. So long. It’s been emotional.

See you later, iguana.

Arriving at the turret-house, Flash, Dale, Aura, Vultan and Zarkov notice a rocketship bearing down on them. Like Cary Grant in NORTH BY NORTHWEST they stand for ages, dopily staring at it, too embarrassed to run or duck until its lethal intentions become completely unambiguous. It’s very human.

“It must be Prince Barin’s ship,” says Flash the optimist.

BOOM! It fires on them.

“Why should Prince Barin do that?” asks Zarkov, not rhetorically — he’s legit terrified at this new development. Friends have become enemies, enemies friends! Chaos!

“I don’t know!” says Aura, just as baffled. Nobody has the power to think during this scene. It’s scary. They’re trapped — and they’re not even IN the turret! they are trapped in a brainless limbo: the Sea of Rockheads. Five characters without the initiative to even search for an author. Stiff, hopeless illustrations of the doctrine of predetermination, they must now trap themselves in the turret to fulfill a chapter title not of their own choosing. But, when you think about it, isn’t that the plight of every one of us? Isn’t every one of us forced to trap themselves in a turret to fulfill a chapter title not of our own choosing?

The inside of the turret door looks very much like Bronson Caves. Explosion! Explosion-like wipe to closing title card! Next week, the chapter title Flash and his chums will be rigidly fulfilling will be —

U.N. memorable

Two images.

The top one is from NORTH BY NORTHWEST.

The lower one is from THE INTERPRETER. Obviously Sydney Pollack has positioned his camera as identically as humanly possible to whoever took the reference picture for Hitchcock, which was then turned into a glass painting. Hitch wasn’t allowed to film in the actual U.N. and Pollack was. Nothing against Pollack, but that just seems wrong. Sort your priorities out, United Nations. Next thing we know you’ll be allowing genocide.

I watched THE INTERPRETER a couple of weeks ago which means I have now completely forgotten it, save for a general impression that it was nice, sometimes suspenseful, well-crafted. Very pleased to see Britain’s own Earl Cameron in the cast, and Tsai Chin too.

Thanks to Randy Cook for pointing out this duplicate image. It feels like Pollack is tipping his hat to his producers by putting their credit over the Hitchcock copy, but for that to work he’d have to have told them about it. So maybe he just told them about the shot, and they said, “Can we PLEASE have our credit over that?” And at any rate I get the sense that Pollack was too modest a gent to put his own credit there.