Category: [Films & TV]

ARGH. I have the famous-ish 1913 recording of Beethoven’s 5th symphony by Arthur Nikisch, and have more than once pondered the way it now sits closer in time to the premiere of that symphony in 1808 than it does to us now. 105 years between the premiere and the recording, 113 years between the recording and us in 2026 (the latter number, of course, can only ever get bigger), and I always find that kind of head-spinning to contemplate. But something about this makes me feel even older… 92 years between the book and the film, 116 (and rising) between the film and us. Oh my aching bones. And then he further noted it was closer in time to Mary Shelley’s birth in 1797 than it is to us and oh my even more aching bones…

And then someone else noted:

Oh NO. There are, of course, multiple arguable points for the beginnings on cinema, but for the purposes of this discussion let’s say it was 1893 when Edison first publicly exbibited his… er, mostly W.K.L. Dickson’s experiments. That’s… 117 years from the declaration to the Brooklyn Institute showing and 133 (and rising) from the latter to ourselves. My bones are no longer aching, having disintegrated into a fine powder from the age of it all. If you need me, I’ll be somewhere among the rest of the dust in this room…

After rewatching the film last night, I did a bit more research on it via Wikipedia and landed on the entry for Wolfgang Zilzer, who plays the young man that Alraune seduces in the first part of the film before “Dad” shows up… he evidently had an exceptionally long career, making his first film in 1915 and his last one in 1987; not quite as long as Curt Bois, who I believe is the film actor with the longest career, starting in 1907 and ending in 1987, but long enough.

Zilzer was born in the US but raised in Germany, became a featured player at UFA before fleeing to the US after you know who came to power, whereupon he appeared in a number of films by Ernst Lubitsch and did a number of anti-Nazi films during the war, including an obscure film called Casablanca (which also featured Curt Bois, oddly enough). One of those films was something called Enemy of Women, in which he actually starred as Joseph Goebbels, but most of them seem to have been minor, including one called The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler in which one of the main players was a fellow called George Dolenz; if you don’t know him, you may know his son. And one of his later films was Union City, the female lead of which was Debbie Harry from Blondie. Across the decades, Wolfgang Zilzer indirectly connected the world of 1960s pop with the New Wave. Even Curt Bois couldn’t claim that, I don’t think…

But the other notable thing about Wolfgang Zilzer is that he died in 1991, meaning that he was still alive when I first saw Alraune. Not only were SBS showing a film made in 1927, one of the primary supporting actors in it was still with us that night in July 1990 when they did. I wonder if he would’ve been as perplexed as I was back then about one of his old movies turning up on Australian TV like that…

So I’ve been meaning to do this for, well, ages. Way back in the dim dark past of December ’24, I put up a poster for The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T. with the comment that I’d review it eventually as part of the Century of Cinema thing I was doing. Then that project fell by the wayside without me doing said review, and I’ve dithered over it ever since. But now here it is… courtesy of Franz Planer.

Now, I was unfamiliar with this gentleman until a week or so ago, when one of the various film-related accounts I see on Bluesky acknowledged it was his birthday:

Hang on… Alraune AND 5000 Fingers? One of the most important films in my personal history AND one of the most baffling things ever to come from Golden Age Hollywood? He did both of those? A quick bit of research ensued, obviously, and I discovered that Franz (or Frank) had quite a career in pre-Nazi Europe and then Hollywood. And then, just a day or two ago, I read an article about a new biography of Audrey Hepburn, which noted how many of her friends in Hollywood were European emigres like her, and specifically mentioned Planer as one of them. I took that as a sign that I needed to watch 5000 Fingers again at last. I shall review Alraune (which I’ve also been meaning to rewatch) soon, too.

Anyway, like I said, this is one of the strangest films that Hollywood ever produced, and it was also one of its most notorious bombs, a little too out there for 1953 audiences (reportedly, preview audiences started walking out just 15 minutes into the show). Accounts of the production indicate it was even weirder before it came out, and alas that the earlier version seems to have been destroyed… it went massively over-budget, straining the already frosty relationship between producer Stanley Kramer (who I still can’t believe had this thing to his credit) and Columbia owner Harry Cohn, nearly half the musical numbers were cut, and its author, one Theodore Geisel (yes, Dr. Seuss himself), was left so aghast by the entire thing he rarely spoke of it again.

But now here we are, over 70 years since it first crawled into cinemas. We’re a bit more used to this sort of thing now. And yet it hasn’t got any less strange in that time; when I last watched it back in the oughts I was impressed by its bizarreness, and I was just as impressed tonight if not more so. And I don’t think it’s the sort of strangeness that can be dismissed as “surrealism”. I think it’s because it’s live action, not animated, that makes it seem so bizarre; I think it might’ve been more “acceptable” in cartoon form. But these are actual people in those spaces, and even if the sets were enhanced by matte paintings or models or whatever, those spaces look enormous. And empty for the most part. I thought about Giorgio de Chirico more than once.

And I was also struck by just how large Hans Conried’s performance is as the title villain. Apparently his performance style always inclined that way, but he really goes big, far more than any of the other actors. Mind you, when you’re wearing these costumes…

…how do you play “small” in gear like that? This was delightful to revisit, and I only wish now that they’d held off making it for another year or two so they could’ve done it in Cinemascope. Imagine seeing the whole of that piano monster in widescreen…

You may be shocked (or not) to learn that porn doesn’t actually interest me that much. I’m kind of interested in the history of it, but less so the actual products of the industry (a nice display of nudity is fine, but actually watching peope fuck doesn’t grab me. It’s a longish story). That history, of course, includes the artwork promoting the stuff, and I think I’ve posted a few examples in the Important Images series… but I just found this one tonight, via a Tumblr called Vintage Adult Movie Posters, and I decided to post it here cos I’m a bit puzzled by the author’s comment about it: “Not sure what the ‘ultimate sin’ is all about…” I mean, like I said, I may not be interested in actually watching the stuff, but even *I* know why this title is a kind of infamous one. This is the film’s IMDB entry, and the plot summary therefrom:

A female friend of a sexually frustrated mother tries broadening her horizons with a sex orgy. Though avoiding it, the new feelings inside her cause her to force herself on her sleeping son. To her amazement, the seduction is mutual.

So… yeah. That’s what the “ultimate sin” is about. The film’s Wiki entry features a rather more up-front poster that makes it even clearer. Notably, the film was written by a woman, that being director Kirdy Stevens’ wife Terrie, and I don’t know what that may or may not say about their relationship at the time. Per IMDB, Stevens didn’t allow swearing in his films; apparently showing fuck was fine but saying fuck wasn’t…

I have so little interest in the Oscars these days that I didn’t even realise until the results came out this afternoon that it even was Oscars time. That said, however bored I am by them unless Will Smith punches someone or there’s a Best Picture announcement fuckup, I nonetheless offer full acknowledgement of when something historic happens. And something did tonight: not only the first female cinematographer to win an Oscar, but a woman of person. Doesn’t that make a refreshing change from all those men of people who’ve monopolised the award for nearly a century?

Sinners didn’t do anywhere near the business I think people were expecting it to do, having earned a record number of nominations; Slate magazine then ran a piece about how it made by then losing the most number of nominations (16 noms, 4 wins). I haven’t read the piece cos it’s paywalled and I can’t be arsed breaking it, so for all I know it might actually be a perfectly well-meaning piece about the Oscars shafting a worthy contender because a black dude made it and that’s why losing so many nominations was bad… but I kind of doubt that for some reason, and people on Bluesky are roundly slating (ho ho) it for being an essentially mean-spirited take… I mean, yeah, it didn’t win 12 of its nomination, but the four it did win were pretty major ones (original screenplay, cinematography, score, best actor). And one of those was a woman of person, too. I think celebrating that is better…

I need a happy story, and the recent rediscovery of an 1897 film by George Melies will do just fine.

The 45-second film, made around 1897, was the first appearance on film of what might be called a robot, which had endeared it to generations of science fiction fans, even if they knew it only by reputation. It had not been seen by anyone in likely more than a century. The find, made last September but now being announced publicly, is a small but important addition to the legacy of world cinema and one of its founders. […]
The cache of Frisbee’s exhibition films also contained another well-known Méliès film from 1900, “The Fat and Lean Wrestling Match,” as well as fragments of an early Thomas Edison film, “The Burning Stable.” They survived due to McFarland and his family preserving them for a century, if often in haphazard circumstances.
After Frisbee died in 1937, two small trunks of his old projectors and films, along with some of his diaries and papers, went to his daughter (McFarland’s grandmother), who passed them along to her son (McFarland’s dad), who passed them along to him.
McFarland didn’t know what was on the reels – they could no longer be safely run through a projector – and after years of searching for a home for them, a lab technician in Michigan suggested he contact the Library.
“The moment we set our eyes on this box of film, we knew it was something special,” said George Willeman, the Library’s nitrate film vault leader.

I love a good film rediscovery story, especially when it involves a film THIS old. Said film is handily linked in the LOC article and proves to be a prime bit of delightful early Melies, though I do think the “robot” description is a bit tenuous. But whatever, it’s pleasing to have Gugusse back…