Royale (w/ cheese)

Found on YouTube-- See it before the powers that be take it away. A video mashup with the title sequence of the new Casino Royale (very nice in its own right) set to the original Burt Bacharach penned Casino Royale theme from the 1967 spoof. Not earth shattering, but prety cool to watch.

Robert Altman

R.I.P. Robert Altman... American Patriot, Filmmaker, Crazy Coot, Great Unique Talent, Dog Tattooist...

GA: ...Is it true that in the forties you used to tattoo dogs?

RA: Absolutely.

GA: Can you explain?

RA: Well, in the forties, I tattooed dogs.

Right after the war I got a dog for myself, a personal dog. I don't know why, it was a terrible Bull Terrier. The guy I bought it from had this thing called an identicode, which he would tattoo on to dogs for identification. I thought this was a terrific idea. Before I got out of the shop with my Bull Terrier, I was the vice-president of this company.

So, I became the tattooist. We would take the dog, and inside the groin, by the right-hind leg, we would shave and put on the antiseptic fluid and then with the tattooing machine I would do letters, and I got pretty good at it, and we'd put the number of that dog that was registered. We thought we were off to be millionaires. It turned out that I just got a few dog bites.

GA: I also heard that you tattooed President Truman's dog.

RA: Yes, I did. We tattooed Harry Truman's dog in Washington. That was a publicity stunt. Although the dog was actually tattooed. I also tattooed a waiter.

He was bringing drinks up to a hotel and he said, 'What are you guys doing.' We told him we tattooed and he said, 'I always wanted to have that!' So, we were a little drunken, I remember this guy took his shoe off and I tattooed on the bottom of his foot his army serial number and his name. His name was D W Stiles. I don't remember his number.

GA: Do you regret having given that up for film-making?

RA: Well...they're both about the same.

Hitchcock as Commodity

While we may marvel at Hitchcock's artistry and crafty cinema, I've always been fascinated by Hitchcock the huckster, the self-promoter. I've often wondered when Hitchcock was first pushed as a selling point for his productions. In his his early days in Britain, he was touted as a "boy genius", and, with his series of thrillers in the 30s, he was starting to wear the sobriquet of a "master of suspense". But when exactly was the image of Hitchcock, the droll fat man in funereal black suit as we know him today and as we knew him forever, used to sell a picture? Was it this sort of ugly looking caricature on this poster for his 1942 movie Suspicion. And not to think that this is too much of an anomaly, here's another poster for the very same film, now featuring a much more stylized impression of Mr. Hitchcock (and much more flattering to boot!). His distinctive physical appearance was one that Hitchcock used to separate himself from his peers. One can't imagine seeing a picture of an eyepatch wearing Ford chewing on a handkerchief pushing Gideon of Scotland Yard or slim, gray Hawks pushing Man's Favorite Sport? Of course, his sense of cinema was distinctive enough to set him apart as well.

Yes, this is a very modest and pissant addition to the Hitchcock blog-o-thon!

Gods... I Like Gods...

Raise a tall glass, wherever you are, to the memory of Jack Palance, issue of Ukrainian-Pennsylvanian coal mining folk, former prize fighter, American film star. As distinctive as his face (sharp, flat, angular, cubistalmost) was his voice (also sharp, flat, angular, probably not cubist though). While his looks made him a movie heavy, his voice, velvety smooth and sharp and cruel made him an actor that transcended the lot of your usual 1950s badguys like Jack Elam, Lee Van Cleef and Neville Brand (although I'm very fond of those guys as well). While his face scored some very memorable moments in film (like his his scarifying death grimace at the end of Aldrich's Attack, a spectacular film!), it was his voice that created exquisite moments of cinema for me.He didn't write the lines he spoke, but by all rights, we should claim ownership. Here are a couple.

"Pick up the gun..." from Shane, as appropriated by Bill Hicks...

"Gods. I like gods. I like them very much. I know exactly how they feel. Exactly." Godard cast Palance as the vulgar American movie producer Jeremy Prokosch for his Contempt. Palance was reportedly very miserable while making the film as Godard refused to listen to any of his ideas for the role, giving him the most menial physical instructions: walk three steps, hit the mark, look to the left and smile... They squabbled throughout the shoot and Palance phoned his agent everyday to get him off the production. Afterwards, Palance referred to Contempt, a film one critic called the "greatest work of art produced in post-war Europe", as a picture he made with "some French director". The tensions made for great cinema, though, and Palance's bestial performance is crucial to the film.

But Palance had little regard for most of his film work. "Most of the stuff I do is garbage," he said. He also had nothing but disdain for his directors, "Most of them shouldn't even be directing traffic."

One of those directors he disdained was probably that Spanish iconoclast, the visionary/hack (or hack/visionary) Jesus Franco, who directed him in Justine, an adaptation of a Marquis de Sade piece, where Palance chews the scenery like Matter Eater Lad (on acid!). Don't believe me? See highlights of his performance here.

You wouldn't want to hear Palance upset either! But if you do, listen here (mp3).

Also, he recorded an album in the late 60s, a Lee Hazelwood influenced country-ish effort. Here's a song he wrote and sang, "The Meanest Man Who Ever Lived".

El Topo Crazy

One of these days a legit version of El Topo's going to be released in North America, maybe soon (here's a site for Abcko Films, who are going to release three of Jodorowsky's films, in theaters and on DVD, one of these days --check out the nifty video!-- Jodorowsky is such a delightful blowhard). In the meantime, let's go crazy with some El Topo links, shall we? First, crazy stills from the movie... from Subterranean Cinema, the complete text (with images) from El Topo: A Book of the Film (the script, actually)... also, from subcin, the complete soundtrack (in mp3) from the El Topo soundtrack (released by Apple Records!)... if that's not enough, there's a motherlode of links on Jodorowsky here (the guy does not lack for fans), including this really interesting essay on Mexican experimental cinema (Jodo wasn't the only one)... Also, if you're lucky, you may see the entire film here on Google Video (I saw a little bit of it a week ago; now the site states that the "video is currently not available -- Please try again later".

Jodo Update!: The wonderful WorldWeird Cinema blog offers the latest news on recent Jodoworsky screenings. Check it out!

Girl on a Motorcycle (1968)

Poster of the Week! -- is that Marianne's torso? Here's a sexy leather and zipper version of the the ad artwork for Jack Cardiff's Girl on a Motorcycle, suitable for your computer desktop. More about the movie here, here and here (it was known as Naked Under Leather in the US). More info on the film's star Marianne Faithfull here (her official site), and here (nice pics but website plays a midi version of "As Tears Go By")and here. Extra bonus: here's a video for her great late 70s record "Broken English", directed by Derek Jarman.

Found on YouTube - Some Castle Films

Found on YouTube: One way for movie fans to collect their favorite films back in the days before home video was to get digest versions in a home movie format, either 8mm or 16mm. Now, you can see some of these truncated versions, complete with sound. See 8 minute versions of Universal monster classics like The Mummy, The Wolfman, Frankenstein, and Dracula (dare I say, the edited version is an improvement, all of the hits, none of Browning's languorous misses and near-misses). See them for yourself. For more info on Castle Films' monster movie abridgements, go here.

Dr. No (1962)

Note: This is an oldish piece I wrote and posted on this site a good long while ago (4 years ago, sort of). The original page it was on is no longer linked to on this site (although it may still be googled), so I've decided to post it as a blog post just so it could be more accesible. Besides, with Casino Royale in theaters in a few weeks, it's not a bad idea to see how the whole Bond phenomenon started more than 40 years ago.
“Attention, This Man… Agent 007 Carries a License to Kill”, reads the Italian blurb to this poster promoting the original release of Dr. No, a rather odd proclamation to draw attention to a supposedly secret agent. In 1962, years before James Bond became “Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” and an international phenomenon, some publicists were probably at a loss on how to promote the film. Instead of images of swizzle sticks, long legs, silvery cars, the lean and long barreled pistol and Connery’s cold smirk that became pop fodder in the mid-sixties, the marketers of the first James Bond adventure, a modestly budgeted film adaptation of one of a moderately successful series of espionage thrillers, had to rely on maybe viewing the final film (most probably not, as this was not a normal procedure of the time), a few production stills, and, quite possibly, their wits and imagination.

Worldwide, most of the posters advertising Dr. No featured Sean Connery with a gun and Ursula Andress in a bikini, but this Italian ad seems to be the only one that featured Bond in a homburg. We usually think of Bond as a hatless creature, but he always wore one during the opening gun barrel sequences during the '60s (even George Lazenby sported one in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the last one that did, actually), and Bond's tossing of his hat on the hat rack in Moneypenny’s office is one of the miniature hallmarks of the early films. Kids weaned on the jokey and bombastic interpretations of Moore and Brosnan would be astounded, perhaps disappointed (if not bored restless) by the relatively staid and lusterless action of Dr. No, which probably seems as positively Paleolithic as Birth of a Nation or a black and white cartoon. Coming as it did on the tail end of that post-war golden age John Cheever celebrated as a “long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light... when almost everybody wore a hat,” Dr. No is a transitional piece of sorts, a last gasp of gray flannel cool and booze soaked insouciance before the world turned day-glo and hatless heads grew their hair long and jerked and swayed to the sounds of swinging London. The Bond of Dr. No was the Organization Man turned Danger Man, a bit impetuous perhaps with a weakness for vices of which his superiors may disapprove, but ultimately one whose primary function is to serve the company. “When do you sleep, 007?” asks M after Bond is summoned to his office from a wee hour casino jaunt. “Never on the firm’s time, sir,” answers Bond, matter-of-factly.

Some of the more unpleasant vestiges of British imperialism crack through the movie’s cool veneer. The Jamaica of Dr. No is not the Jamaica we recognize from The Harder They Come, but a colonial version of white men in starched white Bermudas and a game of bridge in the afternoon while brown-skinned men serve gin and tonics. One of the more egregious examples of this sense of colonial privilege is when Bond instructs Quarrel, his Cayman Island lackey, to “fetch my shoes”. The filmmakers themselves were not above such soft-boiled racism, as in their portrayal of Quarrel as a superstitious native, blubbering about “dragons” with a pop-eyed abandon not seen since Mantan Moreland. These colonial attitudes stem from the Ian Fleming original, which probably was as embarrassingly politically incorrect in 1958 when it was first published as it does now (check Fleming’s description of “Chigroes”, the half-Chinese half-black islanders who were in league with Dr. No: "The Chigroes have all the venality of the Chinaman and all the brutishness of the Negro.”). Dr. No’s ethnicity was not touched upon in the movie, but in the book he’s another example of the Yellow Peril as exemplified in Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu stories, although, in this case, he’s half-Chinese half-German (Fleming had a big bugaboo about miscegenation).

At least seen in this light, the movie does seem dreadfully old-fashioned, a time-yellowed relic of a time we won’t (and probably don’t want to) see again. But when Dr. No was released to theaters in late ’62 –early ’63, it was something entirely exciting, brash and new. It introduced Sean Connery as a model for a new kind of hero, amoral, brave, yet capable of cold-blooded brutality (“That’s a Smith & Wesson, and you’ve already had your six”: Dent’s killing was the single most cold-blooded act in any Bond film, never to be equaled, even in more permissible times). We had to wait until Clint Eastwood starred in Sergio Leone’s westerns before we would encounter a movie hero as nonplussed about life and death. Many critics have commented on the science fiction aspects of Dr. No, but the subplot dealing with radio beams throwing off the gyroscopes of “Cape Canaveral rockets” (a MacGuffin actually) is not so much science fiction but a mirror of the science fact that figured prominently in the headlines of the day. This was, after all, the dawn of the space age. These scientific elements were woven into the fabric of the story in such a nonchalant and cavalier manner, that the audience took it as a matter of fact, without needing to suspend disbelief, a requisite in later Bond features. Indeed, one of the winning points of Dr. No is its very nonchalance and casualness, its easy sexiness, the effortless way Connery glides through Ken Adam’s sets, the breezy pace of the narrative, the fast cutting and quick action which blurred plot holes and contrivances enough so they became inconsequential.

The film, of course, was a worldwide success. Whatever innovations Dr. No may have introduced, these were not preludes to more daring filmmaking in the series to come (some may say “franchise”), but, instead, were immovable elements in the Bond formula, from which there can be no deviation. Although there are more than a few good Bond movies, the first three Connery Bonds (Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and Goldfinger) are the canonical standard, where the formula was perfected and honed to a fine shiny edge. Bond became a cash cow, still to this day, forty years later. Who could have predicted this back in 1962? Who could have foreseen that this tight little thriller would have spawned close to thirty new editions (one cannot properly call them “sequels”)? Like the colored pushpins denoting a franchise location in some grand corporate map, each Bond film pricks a point in our pop culture atlas, some deeper than others perhaps, but each providing a consistent value of entertainment, sex, and adventure, much as an order of McDonald® fries purchased anywhere in the world provides the same consistent value of crispiness, saltiness, and starchy caloric content. Admittedly, this is a very simplistic analogy, as there is some artfulness involved in the Bond movies, some of it quite brilliant (Maurice Binder’s title sequences, John Barry’s music, Ken Adam’s sets, Connery’s iconic performances), but the salient point remains that even the most artful elements of the Bond series became a crucial part of the formula, so much so then even when these creators stopped working in the Bond films, it seemed necessary for Danjaq, S.A. to recreate them with artful replicators (such as David Arnold for John Barry, and Daniel Kleinman for Maurice Binder). Thus, the formula became as familiar as comfort food, and just as reassuring for consumers. One cannot create forty years of uninterrupted box office success with stark originality each and every time, or at least, that’s the conventional wisdom. At least, we can see a glimpse of the time before James Bond became a formula, back in 1962, when the company man wore a hat.

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More Info...
Red Grant's The Art of James Bond is an extraordinary compendium of visuals dealing with the Bond phenomenon, from book covers (including those cool Signet paperbacks my dad used to read and which I devoured during my adolescence), movie posters, album covers, ad mats, concept art, and a whole lot more. Dig on the 'sixties style! Groove on the Thunderball concept art! Or you can check out the concept art for A View To A Kill featuring a half naked Grace Jones. There are tons of Bond sites out there, but this one is one of the best.
Another good Bond site is Her Majesty's Secret Servant run by Paul Baack and Tom Zielinski, a couple of Bond obsessives. Of special interest is Richard Taulke-Johnson's essay exploring the semiotics of Bond (by way of Umberto Eco). Good stuff.
By the way, click on the poster for a larger image. 205K

Bollywood Babylon

More weird crap for your bleeding eyeballs. Dig this crazy collection of Bollywood hand-painted movie posters.