Not yet, Balaoo!

THIS TRAGEDY OF THE FOOTPRINTS ON THE CEILING WILL JAM ANY THEATRE

A long time ago — a million years BC — I resolved to watch every film illustrated in Denis Gifford’s Pictorial History of the Horror Movie, a big green book (though some editions are purple) which loomed large in my childhood. I named this quixotic quest See Reptilicus and Die, and I blogged about my progress until there wasn’t any to blog about. The problem is that some of the films are lost — that’s OK, I discount those, though the idea of remaking them has some appeal — and some were unavailable. The project kind of fizzled after I finally saw REPTILICUS, and failed to die.

BALAOO, THE DEMON BABOON was one of these inaccessible items — and also one of the lost ones. Only fragments survive, and they’re in some cinematheque somewhere. I vaguely thought about travelling there. But YouTube has obviated that requirement!

Excitingly, BALAOO is directed by Victorin-Hyppolite Jasset, director of the evocative and delightful PROTEA, a kind of LES VAMPIRES knock-off which has been entrancing unsuspecting punters since its recentish rediscovery. An amazing work. I see that there’s quite a lot more Jasset out there, and I ought to consume all of it, he seems one of the figures to preserve the charm of the cinema of attractions into the age of sustained narrative. A poet, in other words. I’ve only seen some of his ZIGOMAR films but he also made something called THE MAGIC SACK. What’s not to like there?

Just as PROTEA seems like the start of a serial that never develops or ends, the surviving bits of BALAOO have an evocative quality potentially in excess of the original, complete version’s, though it would have been nice to see those footsteps on the ceiling. Here’s a still purporting to show how they got there.

Doesn’t really make sense, since primitive man is not known for his arachnoid adhesion ability, especially while wearing shoes. Never mind, we’re not here to relitigate Balaoo’s gravity-defying feats, but to praise them.

Although we must first admit that 1913 punters may have felt like they’d bought sea monkeys after seeing an ad, when they Lucien Bataille’s screen makeup, which owes more to minstrelsy or the circus than Jack Pierce or John Chambers. But his physical performance more than makes up for it, and is so athletic and expressively convincing that the makeup comes to seem an exciting alienation effect, there to stop us getting TOO INVOLVED and thereby winding up dead from exhaustion.

I also like that the actor is called Bataille — he’s not the syphilitic tax collector father of Georges Bataille, though it would be lovely if he were.

Based on a mad scientist novel by Gaston Leroux which later became the affecting and underrated DR. RENAULT’S SECRET, the movie-selection features predictive text intertitles, leaping, and some green tinting on both titles and imagery which relates it in a chance yet psychologically evocative way to the front cover of the Gifford. It’s all more than good enough to make you want more, although it’s hard to say how much the movie is enhanced by its frustrating lacunae. Even, say, ALIEN COVENANT might turn into an evocative work if you deleted, say, 90% of it. Although maybe that’s too much to hope for.

Now I plan to finally watch THE MAN IN HALF MOON STREET, which will take me an appreciable distance closer to completion of the See Reptilicus and Die project.

The Sunday Intertitle: A Series of Tubes

The skeletal remains of Angelo Rossitto, still sadly on display to this day.

THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND! So mysterious, nobody making it knew quite what they were doing. Jules Verne’s novel casts away its characters on an uncharted island which is inherently a bit mysterious. The island in the 1929 MGM movie is populated, and the story is told from the viewpoint of the people who live there. Who then get in a submarine and go somewhere actually mysterious, one of those undersea kingdoms you hear about.

Okay, I’ll grant you, it’s a mysterious-LOOKING island.

This silent movie was reportedly begun by Maurice Tourneur, who walked off when he saw his first production supervisor, continued by Benjamin Christensen, then turned into a part-talkie by its screenwriter, Lucien Hubbard, who ended up with sole credit. 10% talking! 0% dancing! 100% hokum! Sounds like my kind of movie.

Even with strong directorial personalities like the first two, it’s not easy to tell who did what, though the torture scenes might be more Christensen than Tourneur. The vaguely Russian look connects it to Christensen’s Lon Chaney vehicle MOCKERY, but that wasn’t a particularly personal work either.

The other thing that seems Christensenesque, and certainly has no obvious relationship to Tourneur père’s career, is underwater monster costumery as worn by little Angelo Rossitto and his diminutive cohort, connect the film to the amazing full-body make-ups of the demons in HAXAN (may I remind you that nobody seems to have any clue who was responsible for those, and if you told me Christensen personally raised and had photographed actual demons I should be compelled to believe you).

The production design (credited to Cedric Gibbons and, true, the aquatic Fortress of Solitude has a deco look) is ace: the sub controls have the pleasing chunkiness of Fritz Lang’s rocket gadgetry. Visual effects vary from beautifully unconvincing glass paintings, through tiny models, a crocodile with glued-on fins, an enlarged octopus, and an army of aquafellows, all jigging about behind a rippling “underwater” optical effect. Plus lots of interesting compositing.

The transitions from sound to silent are weird and distracting as usual. Unintentional bathos: Lionel “Always leave them asking for less” Barrymore is tortured, but it’s in the silent part of the movie, so he won’t talk. The action scenes have lots of rhubarbing dubbed over them, and slightly inadequate thumpings to simulate gunfire, explosions, pretty much everything else. But it’s an ambitious and detailed soundscape (of thumping and rhubarbing) for 1929.

I had to see this, not only because I’m a Snitz Edwards completist, but because of my too-long-neglected oath to see every film illustrated in Denis Gifford’s Pictorial History of the Horror Movie, a quest entitled See Reptilicus and Die.

 

Starring Grigori Rasputin, Ted ‘Rip-roaring’ Riley, the Masterblaster, Lord Marshmorton, Florine Papillon and McTeague.

 

The Dia de los Muertos Intertitle

EYES OF THE MUMMY (1922) is a film in many ways a disappointment — we have Lubitsch, we have Emil Jannings, and we have Pola Negri, but we don’t have a great film. In his Lubitsch biography, Laughter in Paradise, Scott Eyman focuses harshly on a single moment when Jannings has considerable difficulties with his horse, wondering why on earth the shot wasn’t retaken or just excised. The conclusion is that Lubitsch didn’t care, that he lost heart at some point during this film.

The prospect of a Lubitsch horror movie is enticing, but this isn’t really it — the one uncanny image, the titular mummy eyes, is quickly revealed as a Scooby Doo plot to hoodwink gullible tourists. From then on, Jannings’ menacing blackface Arab is the only dramatic threat, and he’s of a wholly corporeal nature.

I did get a brief frisson when I first watched this, when the image below appeared ~

Whoops, now it’s the image above. The pic appears in Denis Gifford’s Pictorial History of Horror Movies, and I realized I’d just inadvertently checked off a movie from my quest to see every film depicted therein, a quest I have called See Reptilicus and Die (a quest that has been more or less moribund lately as the few films left available to me are so very, very unappealing).

As lacklustre as the film is, it doesn’t deserve Alpha Video’s shoddy rendition, which replaces the German intertitles with cheesily-designed and semi-literate English ones. As the film goes on, these become fewer, as if the Alpha Video titling department (I’m picturing an intern with photoshop) had lost its enthusiasm even more markedly than Herr Lubitsch. By the end, you pretty much have to guess what’s going on, which does add a bit of entertainment value.

Hey, Alpha Video, what the heck is a sejour?

Aaaand… the whole thing’s on YouTube.