All is Lost

Episode 9 of THE TRAIL OF THE OCTOPUS, The Chained Soul,  is missing, presumed lost! Although the DVD provides a handy plot synopsis for those interested, I can’t be bothered producing a precis of that — a synopsis of a synopsis seems like a waste of whatever my talents may be said to be. So I didn’t bother reading it either — from now on, I’m as much in the dark as you are.

I’ll just say that Carter Holmes was NOT shot dead at the end of Chapter 8, and at the end of Chapter 9 he’s in mortal peril again, as his sweetie Ruth, possessed by the soul of the vamp Zora, raises a dagger over his back.

Continued next Wednesday.

Another saga came to a close last week, as I finally took possession of two copies of the Pierre Etaix box set from Criterion. I write a jumbo essay for this one, and was eager to see the thing in its final physical form. Unfortunately, FedEx chose to leave the parcel with my neighbour  several doors down, a man I had never met, and who never seemed to be in when I called. Then it appeared that the police were also anxious to make his acquaintance — perhaps he had also received a parcel intended for them.

But I finally did catch the muscular and vested  gentleman at home, and he was charm itself, proving that you can’t judge a book by its cover, or its criminal record. The most exciting part of the adventure was opening my package and finding the Etaix article illustrated with Etaix’s own drawings, painting, posters, plus stills. It makes for a beautiful object, and I highly recommend picking one up.

What else? Oh yes, limericks! Evelyn Ankers is a gift to the lyrically inclined, and otherwise we’ve been singing the non-praises of GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN. Don’t forget to check out the rest of this heap of severed lims.

And this just in — new NATAN coverage. A few inaccuracies, but that’s to be expected…

Buy: Pierre Etaix (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

P.E.

My Pierre Etaix piece, an epic career overview, is now up at The Criterion Collection website.

The other essays completed for Criterion are also there — STAGECOACH and THE 39 STEPS. But the Etaix is, I think, not only the biggest but the best of the three.

Pierre Etaix (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Pierre Etaix (Criterion Collection)

In Stores Now

News department: Cannes has announced its line-up, and to our disappointment, the film Paul Duane and I made, NATAN, is not featured. This despite our slipping the film to the top man with a recommendation from Costa-Gavras. Yes, Costa-frickin’-Gavras. Oh well.

We do have some thrilling news to impart about where the film is showing next, but we aren’t allowed to share it with you yet. It may seem at this point that things are moving slowly, but in fact leaps and bounds have been made…

Meanwhile ~

Every now and then, I like to give you a rundown of all the David Cairns products out there. So far, these consist of DVDs and Blu-rays to which I have contributed essays, but soon I hope to have my name on a line of fragrances, sailor suits, battleships and small boxes of earth from my native country. But until that day…

Available to buy now —

Black Sabbath [Blu-ray]

“The Telephone is usually dismissed as the weakest of the three episodes, which is probably true, but it sets up a persistent motif of the other stories: offscreen sound as a source of fear. And aptly, for an Italian horror film, it’s practically a film about dubbing. The placement of one actor’s voice in another’s mouth foreshadows a theme developed through each panel of this cryptic triptych: the frightening mutability of identity, the fatal instability of reality.”

Incidentally, if you click through to Amazon using these links and buy a copy, I get a tiny percentage. And I like tiny percentages, almost as much as I like big percentages. They keep the wolf from the door, or the basilisk from the catflap as the case may be.

Other movies with essays by me —

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? [Masters of Cinema] (Dual Format Edition) [Blu-ray] [1957] (This might be my favourite of my own liner notes)

The Lost Weekend [Masters of Cinema] (Ltd Edition Blu-ray Steelbook) [1945] or The Lost Weekend [Masters of Cinema] (Blu-ray) [1945] (same movie, same essay, but the Ltd Edition Steelbook is only a few pence more expensive, so what the hey?)

“In fact, what suits Milland to the role is his slightly dissolute air, embodied in those hamster cheeks, that double chin; and his officer-class Britishness, which seems to project a weary distaste for whatever he’s acting in (a quality which would serve him well come The Thing with Two Heads, 1972).”

Rififi [Dual Format Edition DVD + Blu-Ray] [1955]

And from America —

Stagecoach (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

The 39 Steps (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

“The shaggy-dog story that gave Alfred Hitchcock his pet name for “the thing the spies are after” but that is of no real importance to the audience may have been told to him by Angus MacPhail, an English screenwriter with a very Scottish name. If so, it’s all too apt, since The 39 Steps(1935), the first Hitchcock film to really crank up the MacGuffin as plot motor, is full of Englishmen who sound like Scots and Scots who sound like Englishmen. It also features two traveling salesmen in a train compartment who seem about to break into the MacGuffin sketch at any instant but never quite do . . .”

And the latest, and most massive bit of film writing I’ve ever attempted —

“Who is Pierre Étaix and where has he been all your life?

This is the story of a filmmaker who was vanished, banished, skipped over. It’s as if one of those invisible cubicles mimes are always getting themselves shut in dropped from a blue sky and ensnared him. Lips moved noiselessly behind the impermeable seal, passers-by passed by, until finally nobody could see him any more than they could hear him. A hole opened up in film history—a small hole, Étaix would argue, just large enough to fit him into, but a hole nonetheless, weakening the overall structure and preventing a proper vision of the comedy lineage that gave rise to the satirical visual comedy of filmmakers as diverse as Woody Allen and Terry Gilliam, and that influenced such established contemporaries as Jerry Lewis and Blake Edwards.”

Pierre Etaix (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Pierre Etaix (Criterion Collection) The ordinary DVD set IS a fair bit cheaper than the Blu, but on the other hand, these are handsome movies…