Up at The Chiseler, an old piece I wrote about the high weirdness of UK fantasy series Sapphire and Steel, a kind of proto-Lynchian abstract sf show about MIB-like agents of a higher power who sort out problems with space-time. The kind of show you can’t quite believe exists, but it does, and it’s on the YouTube.
The Chiseler’s front page is here, with a range of authors covering topics as diverse as J. Edgar Hoover and David Manners.
Other news… in the last few months I’ve had a number of strong movie experiences, but two of the strongest I inexplicably failed to write about. I did say a few words about THE WIND but failed to follow up with anything more substantive. While seeing that film at HippFest I felt incredible joy and awe everytime director Victor Sjostrom/Seastrom showed us the big supernatural horse.
And at home I ran Masaki Kobayashi’s INN OF EVIL. Now, Kobayashi is a director who likes things dark — I assume Star Trek’s No-Win Situation, the Kobayashi Maru, is named after him. This movie laid on the oppressive angst and evil so thick that I somewhat disengaged from it, and even got almost tired of seeing Tatsuya Nakadai’s Face of Horror, which is a great thing, up there with Lillian Gish’s MAD STARING EYES. But the movie has an incredibly tense climax, a running battle with dozens or maybe hundreds of pursuers, customs cops visible only via their paper lanterns, often out of focus in the background, firefly bokeh.
Both THE WIND and INN OF EVIL are solemn films and both the sky-horse and the lantern battle are scary. But they’re so GOOD that most of my fear was transmuted into frissons of pure cinematic pleasure. The terror was still there, I guess, because to find the sequences brilliant one had to find them emotionally effective. But in a way someone like Coleridge would probably appreciate, the emotion transcended itself.
I liked/loved THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL because Wes Anderson & Hugo Guinness’s squeamish replacement of actual Nazism with Tomainian-style stand-ins did not disguise or soften the issues at stake, but felt more like a tasteful way to blur the lines between the film’s comic-opera approach and the real horrors lurking around the edges. I heartily disliked the portrayal of student protests in THE FRENCH DISPATCH because the substituting of real and serious issues with made-up nonsense trivialized the subject to the point of mockery. You can make fun of self-serious French students, but you can’t pretend they weren’t energized by real and important things.
When David Byrne was making TRUE STORIES, taking American pulp tabloids as inspiration, he said he avoided stories about crime, politics, sex and violence, in favour of subjects that were “too dumb for anyone to have made their minds up about yet.” I sort of wondered if Anderson needed to do the same, or if that was a dead end. Is Anderson’s whole approach a dead end? It could be.
ASTEROID CITY is, on one level, about the question of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, visitors from outer space. And this proves to be maybe kind of a good area for him, as its importance is disputed, ambiguous. Actual alien visitors are just about the most important subject its possible to imagine (if it’s even possible to imagine) — if they’re real. If they’re not real, everything to do with them becomes trivial — just a matter of malfunctioning witnesses — until they show up. If your mind is made up either way, Anderson’s new film, co-written with Roman Coppola, could seem either a trivialization of an important issue. or a trivial treatment of a trivial theme. But if you’re somewhat agnostic, it might land just in the right place, a no-man’s-land limbo of uncertainty, which is also where the film geographically takes place.
I presume this was written or conceived during the pandemic, or in response to it, even if only subconsciously, because it’s about a bunch of disparate people quarantined due to an encounter with an unfamiliar life form. They disagree about whether to obey the government or fight for their liberty. The set-up here makes us side with the libertarians, though the General played by Jeffrey Wright (the best thing about DISPATCH by a country mile) is rather sweet. (And somebody should cast Wright, in a racially-blind way, as Orson Welles.)
Mark Kermode’s review for The Guardian complains that the film is boring, and while that would be a legitimate gripe, I found it fairly engrossing, if baffling at times, and felt it deliberately flirted with tedium. It’s about people trapped in a place where there’s not much to do, and some scenes are literally accompanied by chirping crickets.
It’s possibly more arid even than other Anderson joints — the airbrushed desert is tinted with the pastels colours of one of Saoirse Ronan’s pastries. Everybody has the rapid/flat delivery down pat. Nevertheless, there are standout performances — Adrien Brody’s Kazanesque director sets things up on their feet when lag is threatened, and Margot Robbie’s single scene struck me dazzling — intense in a way I don’t associate with this filmmaker, helped by the straight-down-the-lens direct address. Tom Hanks fits right in, but with a distinctive touch of his own.
Subjects for further consideration: there’s a gay kiss, presented as part of a TV show from the 50s or 60s, which wouldn’t have dreamed of presenting such a thing (Kirk wasn’t even allowed to kiss Uhura — it had to be Spock, who was slightly less “white” SEE COMMENTS), and Wright is playing a general, a job a Black man wouldn’t have had (SEE COMMENTS), although arguably he’s really playing an actor playing a general, which might conceivably have happened on Broadway. It would be foolish, in this context, to complain that these choices negatively impact the realism, because there isn’t any. But do they erase the homophobia and racism of history? Maybe, because they pop out as departures from history, they work, because they force us to think about why they wouldn’t have happened?
ASTEROID CITY stars Dalton Trumbo; Bruce Banner; Max Fischer; Lionel; Natasha Romanoff Black Widow; ‘Flowerchild’; Chéri; Lt. James Gordon; Jeannie Schmidt; Nescaffier; Orson Welles; Young Beverly Marsh; Forrest Gump; Rusty James; Petey (voice); Donald Rumsfeld; Orr; Donald Rumsfeld; Seth Brundle; Wladyslaw Szpilman; Hephaestus; Max Schreck; and Harley Quinn.
Image — and WHAT AN IMAGE — snatched from Green Briar Picture Shows, an amazing site.
GBPS gets into the odd design aesthetic of THE SILVER CHALICE, a coming together of Warner Bros tightfistedness with high-flown aestheticism — the comparison with UPA cartoons is apt, since those were also an attempt to make poverty into a pleasing design style.
The effect of these bare and airless spaces, interiors which have no visible relationship to any exterior world, is to amplify the weird robot zombie dialogue, in which characters announce to the non-world who they are and what they want, regardless of whether their listener already knows. And director Victor Saville’s “blocking” enhances this even more as characters position themselves as if pegged out to dry on a line running parallel to the Cinemascope frame, or cross frame in queerly straight lines as if running an invisible maze. Say what you like, this film has achieved STYLISTIC UNITY.
You know what also has stylistic unity? Crap.
It seems that boldly simple approaches work best in the company of scenes upon which money has been lavished. Thus Scorsese, having flung excess at the screen all through NEW YORK, NEW YORK, could get away with some theatrically stylised effects when the budget gave way. MGM musicals could do such things as long as they were gigantic. Lower down the budgetary scale, movies like DETOUR and SHOCK CORRIDOR could decorate their all-too-obvious cheapniz with bold stylisation, and they got away with it thanks to the vigour with which they applied their effects. Vigour is not something customarily found in pseudo-biblical epics, and it certainly isn’t found in THE SILVER CHALICE, outside of Franz Wazman’s score and a few performances (Paul Newman is really trying, honest he is; Jack Palance makes up for the missing exteriors by being BIG AS ALL OUTDOORS).
Finally, a half-hour into the movie we get some actual scenery, but more exciting still is this minimalist matte painting. It’s actually kind of cool, and shows the kind of thing the movie is going for, but not quite wholeheartedly enough to put over. I mean, Jack Palance entertains the troops in a weird room where the stone blocks have been drawn onto the walls. I think the film needed to do something really obvious early on to prove us that the visual style came from aesthetic preference and not from poverty. The early sets look too much like 60s Star Trek trying hard to look lavish, rather than a Roman epic trying to do something cleverly stylised.
Designer Rolf Gerard had a great stage career doing opera and ballet, and also designed packaging for Chanel and Dior, which explains a lot: he’s able to create striking effects but he can’t quite shape them to cinematic ends. Look at Pier Angeli’s introduction:
Stunning, in itself. If the whole film had set out to be a UPA cartoon crossed with an MGM musical as boldly as this, from the start, we might have been convinced. But then it would also need acting that either compelled conviction or at least displayed a sure hand. And a less plywood script.
Still, the presence of Joseph of Arimathea as a character ties this to the Holy Grail and my Arthurian sidequest — it’s a Grail origin story — and makes the scenography a cousin to that of Rohmer’s PERCEVAL LE GALLOIS (designed by Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko in a style that announces itself super-clearly from the first frame).
Joseph Wiseman, Dr. No himself, essays a form of camp villainy that’s really something else. Put him together with Palance and you have a TV Batman kind of thing going on, not un-entertaining but hard to accept as, you know, GOOD. If only Victor Saville had discovered the Dutch tilt. Or hired Frank Gorshin, who would have fitted RIGHT in.
It’s possible Wiseman has been cast just because his name is Wise-man and so he sounds like he should be in a biblical epic.
Saville also seems to have something against his new star, Paul Newman, depriving him of critical reaction shots that would allow us to see the hero thinking and understand what he’s doing and feeling. Newman does most of his reacting in profile, in long shot or with his back to us, as if his blue blue eyes were so hideous we have to be protected from them, as if he were Medusa. If the film is theatrical, which it is, it could at least be a play photographed from the inside, as Hitchcock would put it.
It’s hard to believe that a commercially-released film would hold a shot like this for long seconds:
The cup itself is produced from a lead box and glows radioactively, putting me in mind of KISS ME DEADLY. Newman eventually does get a reaction shot, but doesn’t seem too impressed. Maybe that’s why Saville’s camera has been avoiding him: Newman doesn’t do awe. If I think of his career, he usually seems to consider himself the most impressive feature in the landscape. Which usually works very well for him, he usually is.
Ah, OK — in the next scene, Newman-as-Basil (Basil!) expresses his puzzlement that everyone was impressed by the cup, whereas he saw nothing magical. So, in the film’s relentlessly literal approach to dramaturgy, Newman was TRYING to look unimpressed. Whereas he should probably have been looking puzzled at how impressed everyone else is.
Joseph of Arimathea AKA He of Many Pillows, is played by Walter Hampden, a Distinguished Stage Hamlet best-known to movie buffs perhaps for his bit part in ALL ABOUT EVE in the role of “Aged Actor,” which seems a touch cruel of somebody, possibly Fate.
The trouble with bad writing is it has a gradual desensitizing effect though fortunately it wears off. So I haven’t come up with a line I really want to quote for your amusement in this half hour. There’s a character called Benjie, though, if that helps?
Virginia Mayo chucks some inflatable fruit to Newman and says, “If you find it sweet, think of me, and hunger for even sweeter fruit.” That’s pretty bad.
The plot is thickening, with Basil Newman commissioned to turn the cup into a proper grail, and Jack Palance commissioned by Dr. No to outdo the Messiah’s magic tricks, like a sort of Roman Empire version of James Randi spoofing Uri Geller. Nobody in this movie seems to be self-employed.
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