Well, that was pleasant viewing. Sergio Martino is considered one of the major giallo directors, despite only really making five of them and those all within the first three or so years of his directorial career, and despite also not really being considered an auteur like Dario Argento (at least according to Kat Ellinger on the blu-ray commentary). He made other films after this that don’t seem to be considered “proper” gialli as such, so this was his last “real” one, and what an… unclean film it is. Plotwise, we’re in the rather delightful-looking (if dangerously paved) town of Perugia, where a female student has been found strangled, with the murder weapon soon being revealed as a distinctive black and red scarf. When another student is killed, a group of female students heads out of town to a villa owned by one of the girls’ uncles, but that’s not going to be far enough away… Torso is regarded in some quarters as a proto-slasher, which I can kind of see, and Ellinger characterises it a few times as “cynical”, which, yeah. There’s something vaguely dirty about it, as I said, something kind of leering about it when it comes to the more sexual stuff (including an interesting bit of interracial lesbian business), particularly the kind of revolting villagers in the town around the villa. It’s well enough made, particularly in the last third or so, and the score is really good, but it’s also deeply unpleasant in a way that I haven’t often felt when watching gialli in the past… interestingly, Ellinger says Martino was fairly uncomfortable with sex in his films, so I’m not sure what to make of that after seeing this. I’m not sure what I make of the ultimate reveal of the killer, who turns out to be pretty much the only male character that the film doesn’t try to make you think could be the one; I suppose I see a certain logic to it but I’m not sure how well it actually works. So that’s Torso, perfectly well made but also pretty hard to like as such.
Tag: A Century of Cinema
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)
Ah, classic Hollywood orientalism. Let’s get that out of the way first, the film is full of obviously white people in varying degrees of makeup playing characters that are clearly meant to be Middle Eastern, but it’s not like any of these characters are actual people as such, so I suppose if we can cope with the other legendary monsters the film features, we can cope with these equally mythical Anglo-looking Arabs? Too bad if we can’t, cos I have a few more films in this vein waiting to be watched and reviewed, and in this case at least you’d be missing quite a lot of fun. As Wiki notes, the film’s not really based on the actual “7th voyage” story, but more on other adventures of Sinbad with a bit of the Odyssey thrown in (though those elements seem to be in one of the Sinbad stories too)… Sinbad and his crew land on the isle of Colossa and fall in with a magician called Sokurah when the latter loses a magic lamp to a cyclops; Sinbad is disinclined to go back there despite Sokurah’s begging, so the latter contrives an interesting reason to make him change his mind. Director Nathan Juran was building a certain reputation as a director of this sort of thing, and we’ll see more of him as I go through the collection cos I’ve accrued quite a few of his titles; here he teamed up again with Ray Harryhausen, whose first colour production this was, and let’s face it, Harryhausen’s work is what you come to a film like this rather than the thespian display… no doubt star Kerwin Matthews was a lovely person, but possibly not the most magnetic screen presence. But you’re not here for him, you’re here for the cyclopes, and the snake woman, and the rocs, and the dragon, and the fighting skeleton (which he’d expand upon a few years later in Jason and the Argonauts), and though HD video possibly enhances just how old these effects look all these decades later, I’d still take them over their probable modern CGI equivalents. This must’ve been an absolute blast in 1958, especially if you were a kid.
The White Reindeer (1952)
Do you like reindeer? Then The White Reindeer is very much the film you’re looking for; apart from the titular white reindeer, there must’ve been hundreds of the bloody things serving as animal extras. I don’t know much about Finnish cinema other than the Kaurismaki brothers and the bits I gleaned from Wikipedia before watching this film; I now see it was, in fact, a somewhat rare example of a Finnish film making it to the US, where it actually won a Golden Globe award in 1956, having previously won a special jury award at Cannes in 1953. I can see why, cos although it’s obviously recognisable as a horror film (the “folk horror” resurgence seems to have boosted more recent interest in it), it also works as a piece of perhaps relatively exotic Euro-arthouse. Apparently it’s not based on actual Sami legendry, but director Erik Blomberg and his wife Mirjami Kuosmanen (who also plays the female lead) certainly wrote something with that feel; it’s the sort of story of that feels like it takes place in a kind of mythical setting, but the wedding scene later in the film takes place in an obviously Christian church, which kind of complicates that when you remember that it’s a shamanic spell that creates the eponymous reindeer. Actually, I’m not 100% sure what exactly Pirita becomes, a shapeshifter, obviously, but we get a couple of flashes of vampire fangs too… Anyway, Blomberg was also a cinematographer going back to the mid-30s, so you might expect the film to look good, and The White Reindeer delivers the imagery in fine style; I mean, given the Arctic Circle winter landscapes in which the story takes place (and which do a lot of heavy lifting for the film), you’d be hard put to not do so… the only real reservation I have is an unfortunately serious one, that being the music; not that it’s bad as such, just that there’s so damn much of it… it’s like the composer, Einar Englund, thought he was through-scoring a silent film, or that he had so many ideas that he didn’t want to give any of them up. It’s not bad, but it is a bit unrelenting and excessive. Still, a solid little film on the whole, I’m glad this has come out of obscurity again.
Dementia 13 (1963)
F. F. Coppola’s “debut” film, as long as, like Francis himself, you don’t count the nudie films he worked on before it of course. I haven’t seen this possibly since the ’90s, back when I got it on VHS… at which time I remember being amazed that a film from 1963 was rated R here in Australia, and I assume that 1) it had been given that rating in the 70s and whoever put the video out couldn’t be bothered playing the OFLC for a new one, or 2) the distributor was bullshitting that detail. (OFLC most recently rated it M 20 years ago, per their database, which is more sensible.) And this is the first time I’ve actually seen the so-called “director’s cut”, too; the film as released in 1963 contained some additional footage shot by Jack Hill cos producer Roger Corman wanted another axe murder. I only discovered Coppola’s markedly shorter version (or at least this reconstruction of it) even existed a day or ago, and now, after a little searching among my usual *cough* sources, I’ve duly watched it…
Now, even back in the 90s when I first watched it, I could tell Dementia 13 was basically a Psycho knock-off, and Coppola cheerfully acknowledges as much in the commentary (though he says it was an indirect one by way of William Castle’s Homicidal); apparently Corman and American International had expressed an interest in such a thing, so Coppola offered him such a thing (replacing the knife with an axe and changing the family dynamic at work), Corman gave him a piffling budget left over from another production (classic Corman), and was then kind of disappointed by the end result. As noted, Jack Hill got told to shoot another murder scene (not in this version, though this other axe victim is still listed in the credits). This character’s removal is probably an improvement, cos the film is a bit unbalanced and unsteady as it is; Coppola is clearly unsure of exactly how to cast viewer suspicion away from the killer onto an innocent character, and Patrick Magee’s weirdly unsettling family doctor really should’ve been in the film more than he was. But, let’s face it, Dementia 13 is what it is, i.e. a cheaply and quickly turned out B film (it came out on a double bill with Corman’s X) with no higher aspirations to be anything else, it’s reasonably well made and effective on the whole, and Corman’s interference with it didn’t harm Coppola’s future career. Alas, Francis would eventually prove perfectly capable of doing that himself…
La fin du monde (1931)
Now here’s a film that’s long intrigued me. For quite some time I was under the impression it was lost altogether, but then in the mid-90s I saw Kevin Brownlow’s Cinema Europe, the last episode of which was devoted to the advent of talkies in Europe and included clips and behind-the-scenes footage from Gance’s film (including the bit featuring the Ondes Martenot played by Maurice Martenot himself), so something existed… then I read somewhere there’d been an American version hacked to just 54 minutes (actually only about 45 without the prologue the distributor added; interestingly, IMDB considers this a separate film to Gance’s) and that was all that was left… then, later still, I read that the original French version actually did survive and, more to the point, about a week ago I further discovered it was available on blu ray. (Parenthetic note to Kino: despite your blurb claiming it was the first French all-talkie, it was in fact piss all of the sort.) Years of curiosity have finally been satisfied, therefore.
Brownlow’s commentary in that documentary describes La fin du monde as a disaster film (about a long-lost comet on a collision course with Earth) that was a disaster itself, which is harsh but… well, not entirely unfair. Abel Gance was not the most easily controlled of French filmmakers in the silent era, and his sound debut was threatening to go over the top much like La roue and Napoleon had done; accordingly, having produced a three-hour rough cut, Gance had the film taken from him by his producers and reduced to 105 minutes, then further to 94 minutes (the version actually under consideration here). It was a critical and commercial that pretty much ended his career as a serious film artist and relegated him to strictly commercial and manageable fodder thereafter. Having first envisaged this film nearly 20 years earlier, it was obviously a disaster for Gance on multiple levels.
It’s hard to really call it a particularly good film all these decades later, but, with hindsight and knowledge of how it came undone, I think it’s one we should probably be gentler with than its earlier critics… mind you, I feel like even they should’ve sensed something wrong with it; bits of narrative and exposition were clearly missing and the editing was, frankly, unceremoniously done and rough at best, especially in the first half. But one thing that’s harder to look past is the acting, and that’s only partly a product of the new sound technology.
Said technology was apparently a piece of shit, according to the various historians featured in the accompanying blu ray video piece; almost all the early sound films I’ve seen have a kind of weird and unnatural “sound texture” (to use Serge Bromberg’s description), but this film’s sound is even odder than most. That’s not all, though. Laurent Veray in that video also says La fin du monde is considered by some to have been intended as a silent film, but enough production material exists to prove it was actually meant as a sound film along… which is fine, he knows more about that than I do and I don’t question his expertise, but I find it impossible to not think that it should have been silent and would’ve been better as one.
Not just because so many shots in the film have clearly been filmed at less than 24 frames per second (and not just the climactic assortment of stock footage heralding the arrival of the comet), but because it feels like a silent film to which sound has been tacked on (the montage bits in particular feel like they were meant to play without dialogue). This is especially true when it comes to the writing and acting; if one of the defining myths of early sound film is that no one knew how to properly act for the microphone, La fin du monde feels like a very strong example of that. It’s written like a silent and acted like one (except you can hear them talk instead of just seeing them), particularly Gance’s own performance, which would feel so much better and more suitable to a silent film with intertitles.
This is an odd film in many ways that aren’t all just the result of it being butchered by the producer, but, as I said, I think it’s a film we should handle with care. Gance was a classic 19th century Romantic who lived into the wrong era in some ways, and his optimism that humanity would survive the cataclysm by coming together like the world governments in the film finally do for the good of us all is probably what dates it the most (remember, even back then Gance had been suspected of fascist-friendly tendencies with Napoleon and this film’s one world government probably didn’t—and doesn’t—reassure those critics); after all, we had a worldwide problem a few years ago and look at how not together the world was… But yeah, curiosity has finally been satisfied if nothing else, and I found the experience an interesting one. Sometimes it’s the deeply flawed works that are more fascinating than the uncomplicated ones…
Man-Made Monster (1941)
By this point in Universal’s history, Carl Laemmle and his faemmle had lost control of the studio and the new owners (including the legendary J. Arthur Rank, who was trying to expand his own business into the US) were slashing budgets. But, after the post-Production Code horror slump of the mid-30s, horror had come back onto the menu; for Man-Made Monster, the studio dusted off an old script originally intended for Lugosi and Karloff but which was deemed too similar to The Invisible Ray, and so it was handed over to one up and coming player of mostly lesser roles in lesser films (Creighton Chaney, better known as Lon Chaney Jr.) and one who was more experienced in horror and whose career was about to hit the legal skids (Lionel Atwill). What we have is a man who survives a fatal accident involving a bus colliding with an electrical pylon; Dan McCormick is a carnival performer who has somehow developed an “immunity” to electricity. This obviously attracts the interest of many people, particularly somewhat mad scientist Dr. Rigas, who suddenly has a test subject for his experiments with electricity and life. The end result is an almost ruthlessly efficient B film, costing less than $90,000 and running just a few seconds under an hour, but it generally feels pretty well-proportioned and paced; quite handsomely filmed and generally made with care, and Lionel Atwill makes the most of his part (particularly the climactic lab scene). The real beneficiaries of the film, though, were Chaney and director George Waggner; though the film wasn’t a mega hit, Universal brass were happy enough with the film to team them up again on The Wolf Man in 1941 (and give Waggner twice as much money to make it with). As the film’s Wiki page notes, though, perhaps the most fascinating outcome of the whole project was that it eventually helped lead to the formation of American International Pictures…
Mamba (1930)
Tiffany Productions is usually considered part of the “Poverty Row” mob, turning out B films and programmers, but if so it was one that had at least some pretensions to move into the bigger leagues; they had their first part-talkie out in 1928 before almost any other non-major Hollywood studio, and then they made this, not only an all-talkie but a colour one at that. Astonishingly, they also apparently planned to make it in 3D as well, though that ultimately proved a step too far for Tiffany, which would go through quite remarkable hell on Mamba, with the budget blowing out to half a million dollars (about five times their usual) and a certain stock market crash occurring right in the middle of production. Still, once it was all over, Tiffany had the world’s first all talking and all-colour dramatic film (its handful of predecessors had all been musicals).
That seems to be the main reason Mamba is still remembered now, and all things being equal its continued existence and rediscovery—here in Australia, remarkably enough—is probably down to that too. In and of itself, the film offers some kind of creaky melodrama, set in a town on the border of German East Africa and the British East Africa Protectorate just before the outbreak of a certain world war in the last third of the film. The titular character is a scuzzy but rich German landowner, August Bolte, loathed by the natives and the German military stationed at Neu Posen; money can’t buy him respect though it does buy him marriage into German aristocracy, but when war breaks out his money’s not going to get him out of that. All of this culminates in a pretty remarkable climax when the natives use the outbreak of the war, and the distraction this causes the German and British soldiers, to rise up and try to wipe them out.
So yeah, very much of its time (especially when it comes to racial attitudes) and inescapably an early talkie albeit not quite as stiff as some (and some surprising violence; the Production Code would soon put an end to such overt bloodshed); a lot of the film is actually shot outdoors which you didn’t often get with early Technicolor productions, and apparently some of the outdoor sets built at Universal are still in use nearly 100 years later. I don’t think Mamba is exactly a rediscovered masterpiece but I’m still happy that it’s back among the living after decades of absence. Plus the blu ray offers a nice commentary by Brian Trenchard-Smith, of all people, which among other things handily points out the film’s numerous Code violations (like the miscegenation subplot) that give it extra flavour…
Lights of New York (1928)
There’s something… not right about the idea of a 1928 talkie somehow in a way I can’t actually explain. I know the popularity of The Jazz Singer in 1927 kicked off the revolution and things developed throught out 1928 to the point where Hollywood had essentially given up on silent films by the following year… but somehow when I encounter a 1928 film with sound, I feel weirdly disconcerted by it. And I’ve seen a few of the surviving examples like Lonesome, Noah’s Ark, and In Old Arizona, plus obviously this evening’s example, and all of them are… strange in a way I don’t understand. Look, it’s just one of those “me” things. Let’s leave it at that. Suffice to say tonight’s viewing is a piece of Hollywood history, having been Hollywood’s first all-talking feature-length film. Also, frankly, it’s a bit crap. And on this second viewing it had not improved at all.
In fairness to it, Lights of New York wasn’t supposed to be a feature at all, let alone the first feature-length talkie; Warners only meant it to be a two-reel Vitaphone short but somehow it got out of hand during filming and director Bryan Foy ended up with a six-reel film… Jack Warner was furious, having wanted Warners’ first all-talking feature to be something kind of prestige, but he reconsidered when Foy threatened to sell it to another distributor. And in the end it was a wise choice; having spent $22,000 on the thing, it returned a million dollars at the box office… mostly because of the technological novelty than the critical acclaim, cos there wasn’t any of that. And frankly, not without some good cause.
Look, early sound films need more slack cut for them than most old films; it’s a period of film history I’ve always been fascinated by for some reason and I know it’s much more complex than reductionist history (as if most history isn’t reductive, of course). It wasn’t just a case of Al Jolson ad libbing a few words in The Jazz Singer and everything changed overnight. But that preview scene in Singin’ in the Rain where Don and Lina’s talkie debut turns out to be a catastrophe… well, it’s kind of merciless but not entirely unfair. (My old DVD of SitR actually features the “take-him-for-a-RIDE” scene from Lights as an example of early talkies being… not very good, and… yeah. It’s not.) Even allowing for the fact that no one had quite worked out what to do with sound technology, Lights is a difficult film to make allowances for; some of the acting is just terrible (looking at you in particular, Robert Elliott as the detective) and the dialogue in the climactic scene is just godawful, and they would’ve been so even just a few years later when the technical issues had been sorted. It’s just… yeah, not very good. Still, the milestones of history aren’t always the ones we wish they were, and to be honest I’m impressed and surprised that this one is still around to be watched nearly 100 years later…
Bedevil (1993)
Normally I’d try and put up a proper poster for a film review, but I couldn’t find a good quality one for Bedevil so I’m making do with this newspaper ad for its Palace Cinemas run (the Verona was a few years from opening, clearly)… also, the top quote about “TRULY MARTIAN CINEMA” from the Guardian critic is kind of noteworthy, partly because there’s a vague whiff of racism to describing this film, the first feature made by an Australian indigenous woman, as “Martian”, but also, to be honest, it kind of sums up my own reaction to it. Tracey Moffatt isn’t really a conventional filmmaker, so not surprising that Bedevil isn’t the most conventional film; I suppose it’s like an indigenous version of Kwaidan, albeit at half the length… good thing, to be honest, cos another hour and a half of this would’ve ended me. We have a folk horror-ish anthology of three ghost stories revolving around indigenous characters, though as Moffatt also noted the stories themselves aren’t “particularly white or Aboriginal” (the first ghost is actually an American GI), and while it’s obviously historically important I can’t honestly say I liked it. The kind of ratty copy I watched on YT probably didn’t help (a good print might at least make it nicer to look at), but a lot of it is down to Moffatt’s treatment of the material… it’s not as deliberately artificial and anti-naturalistic as her short Night Cries which I saw back in my UNSW days, but it’s still pretty stylised and distant in a lot of ways and I found it pretty uninviting. And frankly I kind of hated Carl Vine’s score, which felt hopelessly unsuited to the whole thing and at times more of a parody of horror film music. Kept taking me out of a film I could barely get into in the first place.
The Walking Dead (1936)
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…
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