David Lynch is gone, which news I must say surprised me less than it seems to have surprised some… I mean, the guy acknowledged just last year that he was fucked with emphysema from a lifetime of smoking to the point where he could barely breathe enough to walk across a room, and he went downhill from there; having to be evacuated during the fires currently wiping out Los Angeles seems to have triggered his final decline. To be perfectly honest, I was always a bit of a Lynch sceptic…
…and I wasn’t entirely alone in that, indeed I had some good company as you may see (full marks, obviously, to the marketing team behind the above ad, and I will concede that I enjoyed Lost Highway rather more on a second viewing some years later), but I do know I’m in a relative minority, judging by the outpouring of grief online. I’ll cop to that. I could never escape the feeling Lynch was one of those “surrealists” who succeeded in getting critics to describe his work that way so that he never had to justify it…
…and this is a problem I’ve always had with invoking surrealism, in that I think it potentially offers a sort of get out of critical jail free card for any old contrived nonsense. And yet, having said that, I will admit to feeling a sense of… sincerity, I suppose, is the word I mean, but I don’t quite know if that quite describes it. I’m not really sure. But, on that second viewing of Lost Highway I mentioned above, I also had a second viewing of Mulholland Dr. (it was a Cinemathque double bill at the Chauvel in the oughts), and I didn’t like that any more second time round but I did get the feeling of Lynch meaning this. However wilful it might be, it was also quite deliberate and Lynch was serious about it.
And maybe Lynch was just never my particular flavour of strange, cos I have liked an awful lot of strange stuff in my time. Maybe, if surrealism is about the irrational and the unconscious and all that, then so are one’s reactions to it… if a given “surrealist” work clicks for you then maybe there is no real reason you can give for that, maybe it’s just an instinctive thing. For example, I have no issues with Jean Cocteau’s films like I do with Lynch’s, and I don’t know that I can say why (and I actually DO recall liking Eraserhead, also for reasons I don’t know that I understand). Maybe some things just don’t work for me, even though they clearly do for a lot of others. It’s a me thing more than a him thing. In any case, one thing is clear from the discourse: he seems to have been a good guy and generally decent person, and people liked him with good reason. Makes a change from discovering your heroes are shit.
This seemed like a logical-ish follow-up to Wax Museum, in that it’s another Warner’s horror, it’s another Michael Curtiz film, I haven’t seen this in years either, and I bought it on blu-ray in the same order with it… plus, at just 66 minutes, it’s even more ruthlessly efficient than the earlier film, and feels, frankly, like more of a B-film. Not actually a B-film per se, I’m sure, but it has the feel of one somehow… It moves in quite curious fashion from old-school Warner’s crime saga to, well, Frankenstein; things open with a criminal going to jail and his associates, including Ricardo Cortez’s crooked lawyer, plan to frame Boris Karloff’s recently released jailbird for murdering the judge responsible. Karloff is duly sprung, and duly wiped out in the electric chair… and then duly restored to life by a scientist experimenting with that sort of thing. Which complicates the gangsters’ plan a little bit, before everything ends with a Things Man Was Not Meant To Know climax… As good as the revival scene is—not quite Frankenstein-grade but not far off—it’s the highlight of a good but kind of minor film which I think is otherwise mostly memorable for Karloff in the lead role. Karloff had quite some influence over the writing of his character, and I reckon every change he suggested was an improvement to what was apparently in the original script; he delivers a first-rate performance as the man who didn’t ask to die and even less asked to live again, subtle and affecting, but the stroke victim bearing of the revived man also makes him menacing when necessary. All of this is filmed in quite lovely fashion, too, Hal Mohr pulls off some great cinematography here… but on the whole it’s not really a great film, and gets by mostly on Karloff. Mind you, from what I read and what I hear in the blu-ray commentary, at least the film we got is a good one and a fair piece of entertainment; if they’d gone with their original ideas for it, I feel we wouldve got something pretty shit instead…
So back in the 30s, when the original horror film boom took place, the big Hollywood studios frankly didn’t like horror films, but they did like the money horror films were bringing in for them… Warner’s, however, found them particularly distasteful and tried to sell them as anything but horror, usually as mysteries with some sort of newspaper comedy element and the horror kind of backgrounded. Hence tonight’s viewing, which famously vanished for many years and wasn’t seen again until 1970 or so… this viewing (my first in many years) was almost like a first-time watch, cos I have the blu with the recent UCLA restoration that cleans up decades of print damage and gets the colour values of the 2-strip Technicolor right (apparently the old DVD I’ve got somewhere fiddled with the colour to get more blue out of it); I suspect this now looks and sounds as good as it ever has since 1933.
…though the new blu-ray does have an unfortunate side-effect; the fact that the wax statues were played by actual people (because actual wax statues tended to melt under the hotter lights required by Technicolor) is more obvious than perhaps it once was…
You must be logged in to post a comment.