Bitter Cinema

Rosalba Neri!

2012-01-03T00:18:00.002-06:00

And there's a tumblr page for Rosalba Neri pics and ephemera. Good stuff! Bitter Cinema also has a tumblr page too, for material much too serious for this humble blog. Feel free to follow if you like...

MovieTrailers for Malcontents #1 - Goldginger!

2012-01-02T23:58:00.000-06:00

Just how many rubes were fooled into dropping precious movie-time coin to see "Goldginger", thinking they were seeing the Bond hit instead?

Not to mention if any of the English speaking distributors saw the perils of translating comedy, especially the Sicilian provincial comedy of Franco e Ciccio (English translation). The trailer, to the producer's wisdom or chagrin, provides an entire routine for our benefit. Cracks about thick Sicilian accents and skin color pepper a sequence that takes its sweet time to complete. And there's also that quick shot of the boys garbed as "Mohammedans" (shoe polish and headdresses).

As in a lot of these 1960s European genre films, there are some recognizable faces: Fernando Rey, slumming between Buñuels; Rosalba Neri, in the valley between pepla and spaghetti westerns.

Alien Eyes, Football!

2012-01-02T00:41:00.000-06:00

Disembodied eyes attacking an American football game. Tanks and soldiers stand by as a stadium full of horrified fans look on? Is this advertising a film? Model kit? Or something along the lines of Mars Attacks?

Shark's Treasure

2012-01-02T00:18:00.000-06:00

What drives Cornel wild? Maybe the chance to do an all-male adventure in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico in the waning years of his filmmaking career? Shark's Treasure seems more the province of ambitious 12-year old boys rather than a valedictory effort by a director who's made more than a few interesting films in his career.

Not to say that Shark's Treasure isn't interesting, but it may be interesting for all the wrong reasons. Take this particular scene for instance. The brutal sexual politics and sadism is filled to the brim here, but the delivery, acting, and direction is rather laughable. This is probably for the best.

Novak

2011-04-04T22:50:00.000-05:00

Coming To A Screen Near You

2011-04-04T22:40:00.000-05:00

Yes, the truth must be told.... somehow. Dig, if you will, the picture: an elderly gent sits in warm chair, cold drink beside him, flipping channels. He finds an old movie, and it is remotely interesting. It's a Western, say.... nothing spectacular or special. No big stars. Starring someone like John Payne, for instance, or someone like him. The gunfighter wrestles the bad man to the ground. Indian aims his Winchester with deliberate stillness. The Mexican comic-relief is drunk again as gringos chuckle knowingly. The lawman's horse outsmarts the incredulous Negro stablehand. The blonde virgin swoons into the hero's fatherly embrace. The elderly gent gently laughs as he sips his cold gin.

Such are the simple and insidious joys of Fascist Cinema, your North American version. Not your sturm und drang Triumph of the Will Facsism, shiny, crisp, black, and aesthesticized like a campy drag ball. It's a bit homelier than that Hitler shit, not so skull and crossbones and hell-bent for leather. It's Fascism, if not with a human face, then one you wouldn't mind having a beer with. Fascism you can shoot the shit with, trade recipes and baseball cards with. Fascism that will buy you drinks and nod approvingly as you eye the comely young lady by the billiards table. Fascism that laughs at your stupid racist jokes.

It's a friendly kind of cinema, but not one that you would generally want to be friends with, if you catch my drift. New Fascist Cinema is not really new, and not outwardly fascist either. Lots of happy endings in New Fascist Cinema. Lots of crowd pleasing effects and circus-style laughs. Essentially, it's Hollywood without soul or even body (body would signify a certain heft, yes?). It's light and thin as a nasty crepe and it's 98 percent of what's produced nowadays. Probably your favorite movie of all time is fascist, but you don't even know it.

More to come, maybe....

A Man Dies While Watching Horror Film

2011-04-01T21:38:00.000-05:00

There is a story that an old man paid admission to the old Royal Theater in Laredo, TX, just to get out of the diabolical heat. Thisfine film was apparently playing. He sat in the back of the theater, took off his shoes and socks and wriggled his tired and hot toes as he lit up a Raleigh (smoking was illegal in theaters, but the owners of the Royal looked the other way).

This man, in his seventies, had never seen a horror film in his life. At first, he thought the story was a classic charro film, but the suspense and terror began to overwhelm him. He began to pant and groan. Never had he experienced such fright! He started grabbing his chest and initiated an eerie moaning. But he could not turn his face away. Children (the main audience for this type of movie) thought the man was acting clownish and began to laugh. The kids didn't particularly care for "El Charro de las Calaveras" and thought the horror hackneyed and dull. Watching the old man writhing in apoplexy was much more entertaining. As the "Lobo Humano" appeared on the screen and battled the hero, the old man cried out plaintively and lost total control of his bodily functions. The kids laughed even harder as he pissed himself. Then with a sudden arching of his back, the old man's body stiffened almost upright and then fell back to his wet seat with a violent heaviness. He had finally succumbed to cardiac arrest and died. The kids, now totally uninterested in the movie, began throwing popcorn and soda at his still corpse, laughing like little hyenas.

Hours passed and other features played, and other patrons came and went. Most thought the dead old man was sleeping off a drunk, a very common occurrence in Laredo. At closing time, when the theater manager finally and grudgingly checked on the old man after the last show of the evening, the old man's face, frozen in a grimace of abject fear, was sticky and littered with candy and greasy salty popcorn. The manager felt his pulse, and feeling nothing, walked to the main office and called the police. The manager was surprised by how nonplussed he was by the entire incident. This was the first time anyone had ever died in his theater and he thought he would at least be a little more emotional about it. Instead he just smoked and sent one of the kids for a couple of six-packs of beer. Might as well relax while he waited for the cops.

The police finally came, checked the old man out and called for the morgue wagon. It made the Laredo Times the next day, but no one ever claimed the man's body. No one ever knew who the old man was.

Way of the Dragon

2009-12-02T19:53:00.001-06:00

It's not often that I link to National Review Online (in fact, I've never had), but this piece by John Derbyshire about his short stint as an uncredited thug in Bruce Lee's The Way of the Dragon (or Return of the Dragon) is really quite fascinating. This cranky reactionary, who once opined that "Pop Culture is Filth", is more than respectful when recounting the pure star frisson and charisma of Bruce Lee in Hong Kong, and gives us a rare look into the slap-dash world of HK moviemaking in the early 70s. You can see clips of Lee kicking Derbyshire in the face here (Derbyshire looks sort of like James Taylor in Two-Lane Blacktop). Interestingly, The Way of the Dragon was the only film written and directed by Lee. You can see some of his cinematic handiwork here in his climactic battle with a very young and hairy Chuck Norris here (Lee was not immune to the overuse of the zoom lens either like many a low-budget filmmaker of that epoch). Like the music? You can download the soundtrack at The Manchester Morgue

Ad Mats!

2008-11-22T16:45:00.002-06:00

A lost art form (if I may be permitted the stretch the definition of "art form"), the trashy newspaper ad mat found in the backpages of your local fishwrap probably figured in more last minute movie decisions than marquees or four-color posters, at least in the smaller towns and rural areas especially serviced by drive-ins. Excellent examples of these can be found at the ad mat collection of the The Deuce. More vintage newspaper movie ads (albeit not so trashy) can be found at Emulsion Compulsion (including one for Birth of a Nation. Of course, ad mats are not a strictly American phenomenon. AV Maniacs has a series of Argentine exploitation ads from the mid 80s.

Who are you?

2008-10-26T20:52:00.002-05:00

Nightmare fodder for many a 70s child (spoiled by USA, of course), usually first glimpsed on late nite TV, maybe a local spot on Carson, the CBS Late Movie, or ABC's Wide World of Entertainment. Featuring Juliet Mills, star of the 60s family sitcom Nanny and the Professor, Beyond the Door was an Italo-horror sort of blatant Exorcist ripoff, this time with the mama and not the kiddo possessed by demons. The name of the film in Italy was Chi Sei?, which, translates to the TV preview's skin-tingling catchphrase, "Who are you?", which probably rendered many sleepless, shadowy nights back in 1974.

The Glory that was VHS

2006-12-05T21:11:00.001-06:00

The halcyon days of VHS! -- who knew that we would be nostalgic for those glorious hours spent in the mom-and-pop video store, with the oversized boxes, faded from constant plate-glass sunlight... and the boxes, empty and cellophane wrapped (the tapes shelved safely behind the counter), lighter than air almost, would tumble like hollow dominoes with the merest brush of an elbow. And the forbidden pleasures and horrors the box's artwork would promise-- as if you would never see a movie bloodier and and more debasing than Dr. Butcher, M.D. (Medical Deviant), until you run across a tattered box for Bloodsucking Freaks, and then, one step beyond, the non plus ultra of home video depravity, Faces of Death, where real people actually died on screen! What a world!

See glorious examples of VHS box-art with Critical Condition's A Visual History of Video Companies in the 80s, a series that begins with examples of Paragon's releases, and will update with examples of other video producers like Midnight Video, Gorgon Video, Media Home Entertainment and Wizard Video. 2 day rentals only $2.50! Free popcorn!

Royale (w/ cheese)

2006-11-30T23:15:00.001-06:00

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

2006-11-21T19:09:00.001-06:00

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

2006-11-15T20:43:00.001-06:00

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...

2006-11-12T22:13:00.001-06:00

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

2006-11-09T22:23:00.001-06:00

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)

2006-11-06T21:24:00.001-06:00

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

2006-11-05T22:02:00.001-06:00

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)

2006-11-02T21:03:00.002-06:00

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.

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

2006-11-01T20:49:00.000-06:00

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

Dracula, Has Risen from the Grave (1968), Pt. 2

2006-10-31T21:45:00.000-06:00

Extra Poster of the Week! --A double shot of Dracula Has Risen From the Grave, a more pop art campier late '60s version from the USA. While the Brits were focused on Dracula's rage, US distributors pushed the flick with jokes and semi-clever bon mots: "You can't keep a good man down..." or "Dracula has risen from the grave... obviously". Well, not great jokesters... obviously, but the poster has a pretty nifty modular scheme. Of course, click on the image for a larger version. 204K

Dracula, Has Risen from the Grave (1968)

2006-10-31T21:43:00.001-06:00

Poster of the Week -Halloween Edition!-- After a long, long, unexplainable and wicked hiatus, the poster returns with a vampire cape spinning flourish. Dracula Has Risen From the Grave was the third Hammer Dracula released (not counting Brides of Dracula, in which Dracula and Christopher Lee did not appear), made a full ten years after Horror of Dracula. This really surprised me. I had always thought there were a lot more, oddly enough. Anyway, it's a fun movie of its type, where Dracula is resurrected, kills some people, and is then killed himself, impaled on a giant golden cross, only to be resurrected again in the next movie. Nothing spectacular, to say the least, but these Hammer films were a mainstay on Halloween TV when I was younger, and an intrinsic part of the season as the Charlie Brown Christmas was/is during that holiday's televisual festival. Check out the heavy-duty staking scene from DHRFTG (as the fans like to dub it) here. Read and see more of lead actress Veronica Carlson here. And you've never seen Dracula in such a rage as in this film's UK poster art, which you can see in a larger image by clicking on the image on the left. 184K

Vampire A-Go-Go!

2006-10-30T21:48:00.000-06:00

There's a Vampire Blog-a-thon going on (instigated by the Film Experience Blog), and I wanna play too. And to expand on a vampiric metaphor (metaphor?-- maybe a cliche), let us prey and suck on the fat and prodigious bandwidth of a Google enabled YouTube, as yet still unbloodied by copyright fights to come or starved skinny by a toll on a muti-tiered info-turnpike. We're talking vampire movie trailers, nothing from anything made after 1979, so no Lost Boys, Hunger, Fright Night, or Coppola's own Stoker Ace, kids. Nothing but gold here...

Requiem Pour Une Vampire --"...dans le chateau des orgies". Jean Rollin may not be everyone's cup of blood (and I'm not really sure he's mine), but his pictures have a poetic sensibility all their own, although paced with the languor of a laudanum high.

Planet of the Vampires --"...harboring a form of life worse than death". Bava goes Gothic in outer space and goes nuts with the color filters.

The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman --"...your blood will boil and your flesh will crawl..." A favorite from wayback. See it with someone you hate.

Mark of the Vampire --"Watch out! They may be hovering over you! Or you! Or YOU!" This one goes wayback to 1935. Nice central role for Lugosi in this trailer, and he camps it up nicely.

The Vampire Lovers"...sample, if you dare, the deadly passion of the Vampire Lovers!" Some early 70s Hammer, trying to sex up their gothic horrors with varying levels of success. It's better than most, if that doesn't seem to be damning with faint praise.

Lady Vampire (Onna Kyuketsuki) --Never heard of this one until I ran across the trailer on YouTube. I had no idea the Japanese were making gothic horrors in the 1950s. The trailer's completely in Japanese, so I'm taking guesses as far as the movie's plot goes. The lead vampire (not a lady, by the way, nor a gentleman for that matter) wears a classic Dracula style cape and walks around in cool shades. And he's pretty vicious when he attacks, with really large canines. If you're only going to see one of these trailers, check this one out!

Blacula --"...the black avenger, rising from his tomb to fill the night with horror!" Sure, it's ludicrous, but Blacula's still one of my favorite vampire films from the 70s. William Marshall is fantastic in it (what a voice!). Great soundtrack by Gene Page.

Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (Kyuketsuki Gokemidoro) --Another Japanese vampire spectacular, and this one's really good. Not really a gothic take, although the filmmakers take some of the gothic conventions and play hardball with them. Vampirism (of a sort) explained through a colorful and crazed science fiction prism. This one needs to be available on DVD Region 1.

Orgy of the Living Dead Triple Feature --"This man's name is John Austin Fraser. He lived in Chicago, Illinois. He now resides in the state mental hospital." Not a great example of a vampire movie trailer, but an excellent example of classic American movie ballyhoo. The trailer's a better piece of cinema than any of those three features. I think one of the features is a vampire film, Fangs of the Living Dead, sometimes known as Malenka.

Nosferatu The Vampyre --"A film unlike any Dracula film you've ever seen...." Werner Herzog's version, of course. It's the best version of Dracula on film and it's the best vampire movie ever. Yeah, I said it.

All right, one more... Blood-o-Rama Shock Festival --"Are you ready for more than four hours of blood drenched, chill crammed terror?" Another trailer for a entire program of films. I like the act they use the term "festival" to give it an air of sophistication. I believe all the films come from the Philippines.

The Peter Cushing Film Poster Site

2006-10-27T23:02:00.000-05:00

As a companion piece to the previous newspaper ad post and the scuzzy woman-hating ad for Corruption, here's a site devoted to the film posters of the star of that film,The Peter Cushing Film Poster Site. It's more interesting to see some of the artwork for Cushing's lesser known (and mostly unseen) films, like Cone of Silence or Cash on Demand, although there are some cool, rarely seen international examples of hits like The Curse of Frankenstein and Brides of Dracula.

Newspaper Movie Ad Archive

2006-10-27T21:20:00.001-05:00

Ah, those halcyon days when drive-ins ruled the earth! Wanna see some sleazy halftone movie admats from the '60s and '70s? Check out the Newspaper Movie Ad Archive, compiled from newspaper ads from the Albany, NY, and Raleigh, NC, areas. Lots of retro fun stuff, like this (Ingmar Bergman at the drive-in!), this ("Absolutely No Children Admitted..."), and this ("In Person: Dracula!")!

Snippets...

2006-10-26T23:00:00.000-05:00

SNIPPETS! The image on the left has absolutely nothing to do with this post. Just an image cut out of an old comic book, just eye candy to fill up space in a woefully updated weblog (although, as an aside, vis a vis the term "eye candy", one can imagine an early 70s DC Comics character, quite possibly the Green Arrow, using the term "vein candy" to describe heroin-- or "skezag" as it's known in the DC Universe). In any case, here are some some (sort of) randomlinks to waste some time with:

An early draft of the script for Son of Frankenstein
Bond smells a rat -- The James Bond Music Library
Juha's Buster Keaton Page
Derek and Clive
The Pagans
Break My Face
Lightning Bolt
RIP, Renato Polselli
More Polselli

Splatterporn!

2006-10-24T22:48:00.000-05:00

Back when, more than a few years ago when I wore a younger man's socks, I graduated from the creaky puns (Hollyweird, Karloffornia... You Axed for It!), the monster-kid hagiographies (King Karloff! Lord Lugosi! Prince Price! Saint Peter Cushing!)and the crummy cheap B&W newsprint of Forrest Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland to the slicker, harder, more colorful Fangoria. What I remember most of this transition of horror fandom was Fangoria's decidedly more grown-up look at horror. Gone were the puns... now there were cuss words! And the pictures... Good God! Gone were the rare behind the scenes shots of Lugosi on the set of The Return of Chandu or of Peter Lorre conferring with Basil Rathbone on the set of A Comedy of Terrors.In their stead were bloody, torn latex corpses, gutters strewn with entrails, brains splattered on cinder block walls while technicians laugh and pose with a skinned skull. Fangoria even had a centerfold of sorts; a kind of pull-out picture to hang in one's wall. One of the first I remember was a garishly oversaturated shot of a young fellow with an arrow jabbed his eye (as a matter of a fact, here's the issue in question; dig the rest of that issue's grue). The rest of the photos were as equally grisly, with an almost pornographic attention to detail.

That pornographic attention to detail is fully evident in this collection of Maxim's Best Horror Movie Deaths. Maxim's easily one of the most idiotic magazines on newstands today, a Playboy without the sophistication (even the faux sophistication Playboy used to bandy about, especially back in the 60s and 70s when they used to interview people like Nabokov and Bertram Russell), or even properly nude women. Their list of deaths is not a bad one by any means, even with all of them coming after 1979; and even with the insipid laddish commentary ("Mr. Drill, meet Mr. Head. Mr. Head, meet Mr. Drill. Now you guys make yourself comfortable and we'll bring in some punch and snacks"). Besides, you'll see Jason X's only scene of note (and that's noy saying much). Certainly not for the squeamish, and, be warned, the video starts as soon as the link opens. Horror's best money shots. Dig it.

Found on YouTube - Nana's Dance

2006-10-23T21:52:00.000-05:00

Found on YouTube: Cyd Charisse, she's not. She's sort of gangly and awkward as she traipses between the billiard tables and the dumbly indifferent men. Nana's exhuberance is infectious though, even if we do see it as her desperate buffer against the emotional pricks and jabs her mess of a life now sadly accords. Her sauntering legkicks and broad smiles belie her darkly cornered state, even as she attempts to elicit the simplest of grins or at least one bare nod of scknowledgement from the impassive men around her; men who ultimately, as any viewer of Vivre Se Vie can attest, would be her undoing. At the end of the dance, Nana spirals into exhaustion. Is it a surrender? As one of Godard's subtitles for this one of twelve tableaux reads: "- there's no gaiety in happiness-". The actress in the scene is, of course, the sublime Anna Karina. The scene is from Vivre Sa Vie (My Life to Live), only Jean-Luc Godard's fourth film; also his saddest and most human. Watch the clip here, or click on the image.

Visit Charming Toho Kingdom

2006-10-22T23:51:00.000-05:00

Oftentimes, when grazing through a thorough and extensive database such as the fantastic Toho Kingdom, the ultimate end-all for all things relating to releases from Japan's Toho Studios, riffling through the familiar (Ikuru, Rodan,Yojimbo, or even Submersion of Japan (Tidal Wave)) does not satisfy as much as plucking out the colorful unknowns like Young Guy vs. Blue Guy, Operation Crazy Mexico, Age of Homicide Mania, or Japan's Number One Sycophant Man, and ultimately becoming fodder for clueless conjecture or another round of a game of your guess is as good as mine. If only Hollywood's product looked a quarter as interesting... Check out Toho's lost projects and original concept art (particularly for The Mysterions).

Yakuza Movie Posters

2006-10-22T01:24:00.000-05:00

Quintessentially Japanese, the yakuza movie has only recently been recognized in the West, primarily through Seijun Suzuki and Kinji Fukasaku's work. If you're like me and you don't know much about the genre aside from the work of the aforementioned directors, you can find a good intro here. You can find a very nice collection of yakuza movie posters here (by the way, the site has an embedded loop of the sound of ocean waves). If you're an American kid of the '70s like me, you were probably introduced to the mythos of the yakuza through Leonard and Paul Schrader's, Robert Towne's and Sydney Pollack's The Yakuza starring Robert Mitchum.

Popeye and Pals

2006-03-08T21:43:00.000-06:00

Back when Hector was a pup, during the fuzzy glory days of local television, in the afterschool hours, there used to be half hour programs that strung together ancient theatrical shorts for the entertainment of kids of all ages. These cheapy productions, some introduced by a wily host or some merely bridged by a panoply Duncan Yo-Yo and Wham-O commercials, were a staple of many an American kid growing up in the 60s and 70s. Usually one character would be deemed the tentpole for the program, the program of which would cast a long and wide penumbra that would cover a smorgasbord of disparate (and often edited and truncated) shorts, from the always cool Warner Bros. set, to Little Rascals/Our Gang comedies, to the Three Stooges of course, to, if the programming manager was hip enough, a UPA collection, or, if the station was cheap, wretched recent vintage Terry Toons crap like Deputy Dawg. Of course, Popeye was a perennial tentpole character, but the cartoons were hit or miss too. The Famous Studios color cartoons were pretty good, but the ones produced by the King Features Syndicate were horrible (they also produced the craptastic Beetle Bailey cartoon).

But the black & white Fleischer cartoons were sublime. Such depth and richness in their look, and the detail and throwaway lines in their sound design! They were the only b&w cartoons we saw on televison back in the 70s, but soon fashion took over and the color cartoons took precedence over ancient dusty monochrome. That these cartoons are not available in a pristine and remastered collection today (although you can find them in public domain collections). In the meantime, check out this wonderful tribute to the Fleischer Studio Popeye run by the Calma brothers of Canada. There's a nice collection of posters and stills, even streaming video cartoon samples (Real format). There's also a tidy explanation of the very messy rights issue that has held up any official video release of these cinema classics.

Movie Poster Decollage

2006-02-25T14:25:00.000-06:00

A decollage is the opposite of a collage. Instead of adding bits and pieces of images onto another image as artists do in a collage, in a decollage, the artist cuts, rips, tears and removes bits and pieces of an image (preferably handbills pasted atop other handbills pasted on even more handbills on a wall) to expose other images and textures that lay beneath it, creating accidental and unexpected juxtapositions, connections and compositions. Some call it action painting without the painting. Wikipedia entry here. The most renown decollagist was Italian Mimmo Rotella, who died earlier this year. Here's an excellent gallery of movie poster decollage, most of the posters of a late '50s and '60s vintage.

French Mag Covers

2006-02-25T09:44:00.001-06:00

A very grand collection of French film periodical covers. There's quite a bit of them here. Go here to an index and links to their galleries. Genre fans will like the Midi-Minuit Fantastique gallery (of course, you know that Midi-Minuit Fantastique was the first serious magazine devoted to fantastic cinema, right?). Euro-trash devotees can get their rocks off at the Sex Star System ("Le Magazine du Cinema Erotique") gallery. Bookmark it now! Found through Agence Eureka via Flickhead.
Speaking of French periodicals, I've just found that the grandaddy of French movie magazines, Cahiers du Cinema has been translating some of its online articles into English (as well as Spanish, Chinese, Italian, Japanese and, soon, Arabic). Great for non-Francophones, especially for those of us whose high school French is as weak as American tea.

In My Arms

2006-02-15T22:42:00.000-06:00

It's such a common image and cliche in movie poster art, particularly in those older posters that pushed a pulpier brand of cinema, that it has become practically invisible (or, more properly,unnoticiable, at least to my dim eye). But not just in the movie posters, but in the films themselves; also, comics and pulp magazines. What horror film before 1960 didn't have its monster carry, in outstretched arms, a screaming or unconscious ingenue? It's so common, it's laughable. The image also carries a certain erotic frisson, of course: the bare outstretched leg, the arched back, the jutting bosom, the exposed throat. And from there it turns into fetish; and what is fetishism but a peculiar kind of obsessiveness. And the true obsessive always builds a webpage about his or her obsession (in this day and age). And here we have In My Arms, which catalogues every sort of image of a woman carried by either man, monster or beast. Enjoy, if you want.

Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)

2006-02-15T00:39:00.001-06:00

Poster of the Week!--A surreal and oddly erotic advertisement for the 1933 color horror film Mystery of the Wax Museum. It wasn't the first full length color horror feature. That honor goes to Doctor X, a kissing cousin of sorts to Wax Museum, which had the same director (journeyman and Spielberg fave Michael Curtiz) and the same stars (classic heavy Lionel Atwill and beautiful and plucky Fay Wray). The copy on the poster resembles surrealist verse badly translated: "Images of wax that throbbed with human passion! / Almost Woman! / What do they lack?"
You may find screen grabs of this early example of Technicolor (2-color version) from a DVD review of Warner's House of Wax and Mystery of the Wax Museum on Horror Talk, at an extensive collection of stills and screengrabs from the Fay Wray site (complete with images from Doctor X and Wray's other WB horror film that she again co-starred with Lionel Atwll, the monochromatic The Vampire Bat, and at a blog concentrating on pre-code Hollywood films, Trouble in Paradise (nice!). If you're in the mood for reading and not looking at pictures, you can read the script for Wax Museum here.
It goes without saying: click on the image on the left for a much larger version. 474 K

The Heart Of The World

2006-02-12T23:55:00.000-06:00

How could I have gone through the last six years without seeing Guy Maddin's utterly brilliant short film The Heart of the World? Perhaps it was from a less than memorable viewing of Maddin's first feature Tales from the Gimli Hospital about 10 years ago. While I enjoyed and appreciated the archaic film technique and gauzy images, ghostly in the way it conjured a seemingly ancient and almost forgotten style, technology and sensibility, the movie's meandering narrative and fuzzy logic left little for me to hold onto. In other words, I was bored. Maybe I wasn't yet ripe enough to fully dig Guy's maddeningly romantic parody of early sound cinema or his creaky and cranky comedy. Maybe it's not that the films we watched weren't very good, but that we weren't quite good enough when we watched them. In any case, I hadn't watched another Maddin film until earlier today, when I saw The Heart of the World.

Well, I wasn't bored with this one. It's a frenetic six minute montage upon montage of images, ideas, symbols and tropes; a multi-layered mixture of history, theory and an allegorical fiction about a young "State Scientist", Anna, who, while warning the world of an eminent calamity (and ignored), is torn by the love of two brothers. She is tempted and seduced by the filty lucre of a wealthy industrialist (who is fat, smokes big cigars, wears a stylish 1920 pince-nez and carries bags of money stamped with dollar signs like Scrooge McDuck). Just as Anna marries and succumbs to the industrialist, the eminent calamity of which she spoke occurs: the heart of the world fails; the earth has a heart attack (a close up of a bladderlike heart pumping crazily). Buildings fall; nations fall. Now Anna regains her conscience, strangles the industrialist (framed in Murnau style shadow-silhouette) and falls through a chute to the center of the world where she repairs the heart by the creation of KINO (cinema, film, motion pictures, movies) and the flickering image of a shimmering Anna are projected majestically on flags and dancing bodies. Indeed, here cinema saves the world.

Built as a parody/tribute to early Soviet propaganda films (particularly Aelita and Man with a Movie Camera, billed as a tribute to the Toronto Film Festival, by way of a celebration of "kino", it's much more than this, although I would be at a loss to attempt to explain it. It's movies like The Heart of the World that allow me to fall in hopeless love with the artform once again, the combination of visual poetry, rythmn and a density of ideas. The only analogue I could find to The Heart of the World as a film is David Lynch's Premonitions Following an Evil Deed, the very short and cery remarkable film he made with a restored Lumiere movie camera in 1997 (see stills and download a small quicktime file here).

While foraging through Russian Live Journal sites (and finding some very cool things!), I found one such site which had links (and not one but two) to a 45MB avi file of The Heart of the World (and if you don't read Russian, like me, the links are here and here (and none of them the dread rapidshare). So, do yourself a favor and watch it. If you want to read about the movie, here's Jonathan Rosenbaum's take, Gerald Peary's take, and an interesting review of the film's typography. If something aural is what you're looking for, here's a CBC interview with Guy Maddin concerning The Heart of the World.

Ernesto Garcia Cabral

2006-02-08T21:07:00.000-06:00

I completely missed it, but the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Blog had a fantastic collection of Mexican Epoca de Oro lobby cards, all of them illustrated by the fantastic Ernesto Garcia Cabral. Not only does archive director Stephen Worth share some extraordinary images, he also shares a hot eBay tip: "An archive of movie memorabilia in Mexico recently culled duplicates from their collection, releasing tens of thousands of pieces onto the market- both Mexican titles and American ones- musicals, horror movies, adventure films, film noir and westerns by the hundreds. These lobby cards have found their way onto eBay, but since few people are aware of Cabral and even fewer recognize the Spanish titles for these films, these amazing treasures are selling for a song." Nice guy that he is, he also provides a link to the seller of these cards. Let me tell you, these things are cheap, cheap, cheap!

You can find more of Cabral's work at these galleries of vintage Mexican movie posters and political cartooning and cover art for the newsweekly magazine Jueves. And, yes, everything is for sale.

Kurosawa and Mifune

2006-02-07T22:54:00.001-06:00

For many years, Toshiro Mifune was, to many Western filmgoers, THE Japanese movie star. In the years shortly after the end of World War II, Kurosawa's films starring Mifune brought attention and glory to the Japanese movie industry (self-imposed, if truth be told), a national cinema that was isolated from Western eyes until after the war, and now, the history of which, from examples of high art, to direct to video exploitation, seems every bit as crucial to the story of World Cinema as the histories ofGermany, Italy, France, or even Hollywood. In the hyper-hip milieu of current critical and pop cine-darlings like Miike, Suzuki and "Beat" Takeshi (and I love all three), we tend to forget the impact and importance of Kurosawa and Mifune's work in opening the door, so to speak.

Here's a good Mifune appreciation site, complete with images from his films, movie reviews, and a nice collection of Kurosawa film poster cards. Here's the BFI's Kurosawa page, along with some appreciations from Bright Lights and Senses of Cinema.

Hitchcock Syllabus

2006-02-05T23:36:00.000-06:00

Browsing through online syllabi can be fun; also interesting as they can give you a snapshot of what college students are learning. And some class webpages are just downright interesting, like this site/syllabus for Dr. Glen Johnson's Hitchcock class at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Tons of cool and enlightening stuff here, especially an extensive gallery of framegrabs from Hitchcock's films, including the criss-cross sequence from Strangers on a Trains, Hitchcock's mothers, and how Hitchcock characters throw a punch (usually straight at the camera). Sounds like an interesting class.

MONSTERVILLE

2006-02-05T22:37:00.000-06:00

Very nice Flickr set of monster movie ephemera, including this photo of a 1932 newspaper ad for Frankenstein glued to the back of an advertising sign (check out the hand drawn likeness of the monster, already an iconic presence less than a year after the film's release). The same Flickr member (Neato Coolville) also has an excellent set of movie theater ephemera, including this 1933 ticket advertising the next week's attraction, King Kong!

Poster of the Week - 2001: A Space Odyssey

2006-02-02T00:47:00.000-06:00

Poster of the Week!--An interesting Polish poster advertising Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. I've loved this movie for more than 30 years, for different reasons at different points of my life. When I first viewed it from the backseat of a station wagon at a South Texas drive-in theater sometime in the very early 70s, I was struck by the pure spectacle and awesome wonder of the film. I had been awed by movies before in my short movie-watching history, but nothing like 2001. For better or worse, it planted a seed. Fast-forward a bit to the teens and twenties, I discovered that there was more to 2001 than spectacle or fantastic special effects. I discovered that it was ...profound. Monkish, dark, shaggy Kubrick became a prophet. I would pontificate to anyone who would listen about 2001's utter genius and the clean grandeur of its presentation. A couple of pet theories uttered over beer and cigarettes: 2001 is an epic poem to science; it's a religious film for the non-religious, spirituality for atheists. Or something like that.

Fast forward to the thirties and beyond the infinite. In recent re-viewings (once a year, pretty much), instead of pondering the big ideas, piecing the puzzle, I've gone back to enjoying the spectacle just for spectacle's sake or just enjoying the a newfound texture to the visuals. This could be because of two factors: the somewhat recently struck 70mm prints which I've seen projected at least three times in a vintage movie palace; also, ownership of the restored remastered DVD. One way, the movie becomes monstrously huge, grandly universal, telescopic even, as it attempts to bring the whole universe to our big wide window. And then there's the microscopic aspect of the DVD experience, where the viewer can freeze any frame, rewind, fast forward, play in slow motion, zoom into detail. After years of watching SLP pan & scan dupes, these new opportunities to watch and understand 2001 were revelations. Or at least a charge for re-evaluation.

So, is the movie, as they say, profound? Sure. But it's also fun to play in slow motion and capture the perfect freeze frame of Kubrick's reflection (Kubrick was shooting with a hand-held camera) on Heywood Floyd's helmet visor as he's coming down the ramp to view the TMA. It only happens for a split second. Or you might dig on the kitschiness of Space Station V, the impossibly white floors and walls and clashing red Djinn chairs, the HoJo's, the missing cashmere sweater, the Bell Picturephone. Or chuckle at Dr. Floyd's Hugh Beaumont-Fred McMurray goofy sitcom dad routine, especially when he talks about loyalty oaths (with a gladhanded chuckle: "Well, Bill, heh heh heh..."). Or realize that the only "art" created within the narrative space of the movie are Bowman's bloodless drawings of the hibernacla, which HAL kindly appreciates. In fact, HAL appears to be the only being to truly appreciate art. No one reads a book or listens to music. There's a film playing on the spaceliner and Floyd, the dunderhead, is asleep.

Of course, the irony is that many people fell asleep during 2001. But those who didn't fall asleep all started websites. Some of them even started sites about their favorite movie. And for some of them, 2001 is their favorite movie.

You can start with 2001: A Space Odyssey-Internet Resource Archive, a site that's been around since November 1994.... or with The Underview, a 2001 site that's only been with us since March 1996.

And there's a Kubrick fan site with some cool stuff not found elsewhere: scenes from Mad Magazine's 2001 satire (the line about fresh meat from the freezers is wickedly funny) and stills from cut scenes....

And speaking of cut scenes, outtakes and trims, here's an extensive article on what was trimmed and what wasn't, explicating the differences between the premiere version screened on April 2 and what screened after the furious re-edit and 19 minutes were trimmed in a three day marathon that started on April 5. Count me among those who would gladly donate a gonad to see this original cut...

Then there's The Kubrick Site, which, as the site says, is a "non-profit resource archive for documentary materials regarding, in whole or in part, the work of the late American film director and producer Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999)". Lots of good things here. One of my favorite pieces about the film is em>2001: Random Insights, by Barry Krusch.... for those a bit more mechanical, here's a rundown of all the space hardware seen in the movie... and also some 3D modeling images.... and if you like modeling, you may like theLego rendition.

Some recollections of their first time.... also the grandmaster chess game Kubrick used for the game between Poole and HAL. So, was HAL truly insane?

If you're looking for intelligent Kubrick talk, there's no better place than the alt.movies.kubrick usenet group. Some interesting threads I've found: a comparison between 2001 and Un Chien Andalou; the incestuous relationship between 2001 and Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's Thunderbirds TV program; and the fans' reaction to a Leslie Nielsen parody of 2001....

There was also a play based on 2001 produced in Lansing, Michigan. Here's a newspaper article on the play. Here's the production company's page, complete with pictures and posters.

And there's more. Here's a documentary (in three parts) on Kubrick. I've also put together a Flickr 2001 set for your viewing pleasure.

And, yes, click on the image on the upper left for a larger version. 113 K

Nam June Paik 1932-2006

2006-01-31T00:14:00.000-06:00

RIP Nam June Paik 1932-2006 Here are some Nam June Paik links... Artcyclopedia... some recordings on mp3 from UbuWeb... a nice virtual exhibit of Paik's installations, from Italy... Paik's official site... his Wikipedia entry... and his New York Times obit.

Highest Concept

2006-01-28T12:20:00.000-06:00

"His Day Will Come -- 6-6-06"-- In perhaps the highest example of high concept marketing, the makers of The Omen remake probably went from the release date backwards to construct their movie. You can see the teaser trailer here.

Psychiatry in the Cinema

2006-01-24T22:42:00.000-06:00

Psychiatry in the Cinema: an interesting view (written by a psychiatrist) on how psychiatry, mental health and mental health professionals are portrayed in the movies. Here's Dr. Ben Green on a Jim Carrey comedy: "A special mention is very much deserved for Me, Myself and Irene (2000). This film was directed by the Farelly brothers, who also concocted depictions of excess in such films as There's Something about Mary (1998). Its depiction of a policeman with schizophrenia, played by Jim Carrey, is almost entirely devoid of accuracy, sensitivity and subtlety. His behaviour is clownish, obscene, violent and sexually assaultative. He is referred to as 'schizo' and 'psycho'. It was criticised by SANE Australia, the US National Alliance for Mental Illness and the UK Royal College of Psychiatrists amongst other organisations."

Snapshot of Fassbinder

2006-01-23T21:44:00.000-06:00

The Guardian brings us a fascinating snapshot of Rainer Werner Fassbinder at work in 1973, shooting the movie Martha Michael Ballhaus also reminisces about working with Fassbinder.

TV Ads - Spaghetti Western Style

2006-01-23T21:28:00.000-06:00

For a few dollars more! The sounds and images of the spaghetti western have so seeped in our international culture that TV admen didn't waste a second appropriating its iconography. Shobary's Spaghetti Westerns has a page devoted to commericals aping the Italian western. There's also a page of downloadable trailers and a nice gallery of poster art.

Poster of the Week! Mondo Cane

2006-01-22T17:24:00.001-06:00

Poster of the Week! -Mondo Cane (1962). The original "shockumentary" by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi created a cottage industry of sleaze documentaries, reality conjured as freak show. An interesting side story concerns the painter Yves Klein. From Philippe Vergne from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN:

"Realized in the privacy of his studio or during performances,... conceived by covering the bodies of nude female models—his 'living brushes'—with ultramarine blue paint, which he named and patented as International Klein Blue (IKB). He then instructed these living brushes to produce body prints, radically challenging painting by conciliating it with performance.... Commissioned to be featured in Gualtiero Jacopetti’s film Mondo Cane (1962), the work was realized in front of a camera, through a large sheet of glass, with the artist’s mistaken belief that the filmmaker would do for him what Hans Namuth did for Jackson Pollock, what Henri-Georges Clouzot did for Picasso. Klein could not reconcile himself to the rude awareness that Mondo Cane was the first global exploitation film—a “shockumentary”—abusing his work dedicated to spiritual perceptions of the world. Publicly humiliated at the film’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 1962, he never recovered from the shock and died a few weeks later of a heart attack. Mondo Cane put an end to Klein’s blue revolution and Mondo Cane Shroud became the ethereal shroud of the artist himself. The Walker’s acquisition, which occurred after nearly eight years of searching, of this marvelous painting and accompanying wooden tub, encrusted with the IKB in which the models bathed, brings together the history of film, performance, and painting."

One can see an image of the painting here. Mondo Cane has been released on DVD by Blue Underground as part of their Mondo Cane Collection, a collection of Jacopetti and Prosperi's documentary films (including the unreal Goodbye Uncle Tom). It's out of print, according to Blue Underground, but you can find it easily on eBay and Amazon (and possibly other retail outfits). Here are some reviews of the collection, from Kinocite, DVD Maniacs and Monsters at Play. Inspired by a post by The Dirtiest Thing in the Whole Wide World, a cool blog that specializes in old sleaze. The movie poster is from Poland. Click on the image on the left for a larger version. 541 K

Once Upon a Time in Italy

2006-01-22T01:10:00.000-06:00

Heads up, Angelenos! Today's the last day of a Sergio Leone exhibit, "Once Upon A Time In Italy . . . The Westerns Of Sergio Leone", at LA's Museum of the American West. Very nice site for the exhibit, with plenty of Quicktime movies and rare images.

Bollywood Lp Covers

2006-01-21T23:22:00.000-06:00

Here's a splendid collection of covers of Bollywood soundtrack albums.

Pink Movies

2006-01-21T23:08:00.001-06:00

The movies are called pinku eiga or "pink films", softcore erotic films produced in Japan. These movies are waist-deep in kink, sometimes seriously subversive, sexually, aesthetically and politcally, and sometimes violent (and, at times, reprehesively so). And these films were not all strictly straight; there are gay pink movies too. In the male dominated Japanese film idustry, pink movie production was about the only way a woman filmmaker could actually direct a commercial feature film. One such director is Sachi Hamano, who has been directing pink films since 1971; you can see a 5 minute interview with her, courtesy of SexTV. If you're interested in advertising art, check out this nice gallery of pink movie posters.

Mexican Superheroes!

2006-01-18T22:26:00.001-06:00

There's more to Mexican superheroes than masked wrestlers, as pointed out in this Catalogue of International Superheroes. There are guys like Relampago (not to be confused with Relampago, the superhero from Corpus Christi) and El Hombre Mosca (the man will the remarkable powers of a house fly. Of course, you'll find the classic luchadores, of which La Mujer Murcielago (known here as Batwoman). This Batwoman is not to be confused with her rattier North American counterpart from Jerry Warren's The Wild World of Batwoman. Playing Batwoman in the Mexican version is curvy Maura Monti, who also played a Martian in Santo contra la Invasion de los Marcianos (the poster of which seems to be a blatant copy of Robinson Crusoe on Mars's, for what it's worth).

Die imposante Galerie

2006-01-18T20:12:00.000-06:00

Nice collection of European genre movie art and comics from the 60s and the 70s on this German site. Some pretty cool galleries of Schulmadchen Report lobbycards, so maybe a bit too racy for worktime browsing. Also a nice Klaus Kinski collection.

Lounging with Lugosi

2006-01-14T16:10:00.000-06:00

Long before the days of morphine, grade Z thrillers and Brooklyn gorillas, Bela Lugosi lived large. Still warm (if not hot) from his first flush of Dracula success, when he began his claim as one of Hollywood's premiere bogeymen (and whose bogeyman skills eventually cursed him to the dusty backlots of Poverty Row), Lugosi maintained the simple and elegant lifestyle of a European sophisticate in Southern California, as evidenced in these remarkable fan magazine photos presented here and here by Greenbriar Picture Shows, a wonderful new blog that specializes in presenting publicity stills, art, and press books. Cool stuff presented in the last two months include some publicity for the Bob Hope, Paulette Goddard spook comedy The Ghost Breakers (including this remarkable image); a couple of trade ads from MGM at the start of the talkies ("Reach for a talkie instead of a squeak!"); and spending the day with Olivia DeHavilland.

An interesting quote from Lugosi: "Where once I had been the master of my professional destinies, with a repertoire embracing all types of men... I became Dracula's puppet."

Poster of the Week! LSD - Flesh of Devil

2006-01-11T23:29:00.001-06:00

Poster of the Week!- LSD-Flesh of Devil. Not only is today International Showgirls Day, but it's also the birthday of Dr. Albert Hoffman, Ph.D. The father of LSD turns a vigorous 100 today; he is the guest of honor at a LSD symposium in Basel, Switzerland. He refers to LSD as his "problem child", but it's unlikely Dr. Hoffman is aware of the "problem films" (or should that be problematic films?) his discovery inspired. And here, the inspirations should include not only LSD's mind opening effect on moviemakers and audiences, but also the exploitative angle pursued by hucksters (carny grads) who saw a vein of gold in the acid.

"Listen to the Sound of Love...Feel Purple...Taste Green...Touch the Scream that Crawls Up the Wall!" reads the tagline for Corman's The Trip. The tag for the film advertised by this week's poster is not as lyrical: "Five Dollars 'Trip' to the Moon". Perhaps, your passport to lunacy? A political statement on the concurrent billions of dollars and rubles spent on sending a man to the moon? Why do that if 5 bucks can offer you the same thrill? Well, maybe.

I have not seen LSD-Flesh of Devil, so I can't give you much more than what the poster offers. The IMDB has one user's comment, which is the only descriptive text I found about the movie. It's pretty good, actually: "The film postures itself as being anti-drug of course. The LSD trips represented are only somewhat hallucinatory using minor tricks of lighting or superimposition to portray the wild effects of the drug. There isn't much imagination (or money) spent on convincing us of the horrors of LSD so these sequences are unfortunately rather dull and repetitive which in turn makes the drug seem like a boring way to amuse oneself.... The best line in the film is spoken by the villain, Mister X, as he describes his international crime syndicate: `We're a secret organization with a strange name: ECHO."

Of course, click on the image on the left for a larger version. 499K

Leaving Inhibitions at the Door

2006-01-11T14:13:00.000-06:00

Haven't you heard? It's International Showgirls Day (the 10th anniversary of the Dutch premiere of Paul Verhoeven and Joe Ezterhaus's Showgirls... and, yes, Ezterhaus should get as much credit or blame as Verhoeven). I've been graciously asked to put in my own two cents, so I might as well toss in my little grubby pennies, although I don't know if I would have much to add to the fray. I saw the movie about 9 years ago on full-screen VHS (NC-17 version, though), and I don't remember much, but I do remember not liking it. In fact, I thought it was quite an ugly piece of work. That said, I would never venture to say Showgirls is without any merit. Indeed, I know there are many who love the shit out of it, and I'm fully (fooly?) aware of Verhoeven's reputation in some circles as a master satirist, subversively and jerkily baiting our notions and tweaking our perceptions of our grand American excess.

So, to flog a dead horse, yes sir, you're absolutely right, we are a goddamn mess; and thank you, Paul, for bravely providing the funhouse mirror to see our ourselves (darkly perhaps), in spite of ourselves, using every bone, screw and dye in your Dutch boy (done good)paintbox and seducing us all with your olive oil voice and European charm. Loud and stupid America (all of us!) salutes you, and now watches the legacy of your work on VH1 reruns.

Kudos to Flickhead for keeping it real.

Some Blogs to Note

2006-01-08T18:07:00.000-06:00

Some blogs to note-- If you like Marilyn, or just pictures of Marilyn, head out to Sugarland, a French photo-blog that's been posting tons and tons of Marilyn Monroe photos, including this crazy collection of Marilyn animated gifs. Cool stuff!

Then there's GPod, which posts bit torrent links to off-beat and rare films. This week's torrent is Les Blank's short documentary Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. Other entires include a Fench documentary on Orson Welles, and a Sergei Paradjanov short Kiev Frescos, a "film collage" made up of rushes and tests Paradjanov shot before the Soviet government shut down the project.

Snowblood Apple - Asian Extreme Cinema

2006-01-06T20:01:00.000-06:00

Disclaimers abound on Snowblood Apple, a fantastic site that specializes on the more extreme edges of Asian (particularly Japanese) cinema. Here's one: "PLEASE - If you are of a nervous disposition, or under the legal age limit to view the equivalent of NC-17 rated movies, do not proceed any further down this page. You will find images of an extremely graphic and violent nature on the Guinea Pig movie pages. If you do not wish to proceed, click here or on any link on the left to exit." It's a fair warning, and if you know anything about the Guinea Pig series, you'll understand why (I've never seen them, nor have any desire to see them, but for some reason I'm utterly fascinated --and almost appalled in a way-- that they exist). Of course, you can find all sorts of info on the Guinea Pig films on the web, but what's really fantastic about Snowblood Apple is an incredible collection of images and screenshots from tons of movies, including this visual comparison of the three version of The Ring (The Japanese, Korean, and Hollywood versions). Also, some screenshots and a review of the rare Godspeed You! Black Emperor, a documentary on a Japanese youth motorcycle gang from the mid-70s. A nice companion site to Midnight Eye, a site I also love.

Classic Trailers!

2006-01-03T22:16:00.000-06:00

Where else on the wild and wooly interweb would you find the delirious trailer for Rene Cardona's Night of the Bloody Apes (known in its native Mexico as La Horriplante Bestia Humana, which translates as The Horrifying Human Beast). Why, Classic Trailers, of course! "Half-man! Half-beast! All horror!" And dig the crazy electronic score! You can find it at their cult corner page. Tons of other cool stuff, too. Even classics, like my personal fave 2001. Fantastic site!

Haunting Images

2006-01-03T20:46:00.000-06:00

Med students have always been a jaunty, jaundiced bunch, even at the turn of the century (19th/20th, that is). From the Dittrick Medical History Center at Case Western Reserve University in beautiful Cleveland, OH, comes Haunting Images, an online exhibit of "Photography, Dissection, and Medical Students". Here are century old images, culled from a collection numbering about 200, featuring students dissecting cadavers, posing with them in group shots, or just clowning around. Interesting, if gruesome, stuff.

Donald Fagen meets Ennio Morricone

2006-01-02T21:11:00.000-06:00

From an interview Steely Dan vocalist Donald Fagen had with great Italian film maestro Ennio Morricone, published in Premiere magazine in the early '80s, reproduced in the I Love Music forum.

Fagen: But isn't it true that the Leone films, with their elevation of mythic structures, their comic book visual style and extreme irony, are now perceived as signaling an aesthetic transmutation by a generation of artists and filmmakers? And isn't it also true that your music for those films reflected and abetted Leone's vision by drawing on the same eerie catalog of genres - Hollywood western, Japanese samurai, American pop, and Italian Opera? That your scores functioned both 'inside' the film as a narrative voice and 'outside' the film as the commentary of a winking jester? Put it all together and doesn't it spell 'postmodern', in the sense that there has been a grotesque encroachment of the devices of art and, in fact, an establishment of a new narrative plane founded on the devices themselves? Isn't that what's attracting lower Manhattan?

Morricone: [ shrugs ]

Luis Bunuel - Obsesiones

2006-01-02T20:37:00.000-06:00

Obsessions! We all have them, but the great ones tend to have them in spades. Think Hitchcock and his icy, unobtainable blondes; Fellini's clowns holding up their crazy funhouse mirrors; Buster Keaton's outsized mad machinery. Quite possibly, these great obsessions (from great obsessors) retain their freshness (while others seem to be flogging a dead horse) because these obsessions (or, better said, motifs) are irrevocably tied to their obsessed parents' work or worldview, and, without this personal stamp, the work becomes, oddly, less unique. Or, this authorial preoccupation could be a crutch for budding auteurists everywhere (as some may point out).

More than other directors, the work of Luis Bu&tilden;uel is filled with such personal signposts and motifs. In an interesting experiment of film criticism (without any text except for film titles), El Centro Virtual Cervantes presents a collection of framegrabs from Bu&tilden;uel's films, categorized by motif and, yes, obsession. Here, you find them all, from his preoccupation about insects; faces at windows; the disfigured and handicapped; and the shapely turn of a woman's leg. And, not to mention, his benign obsession with women's shoes and his love-hate affair with the Catholic Church. There's a lot here, so have fun!

Poster of the Week- Ensayo de un Crimen

2006-01-01T21:41:00.001-06:00

Happy 2006, everyone! Wring out the clothes! Wring in the dew! Let's start fresh, shall we? This week, I offer a startling image advertising Luis Buñuel's pitch-black serial killer comedy Ensayo de un Crimen, or, as it's otherwise known, The Criminal Life of Archibaldo Cruz. The boody straight razor makes the film look like a Grand Guignol spectacular, although it's nothing of the sort. Essentially, it's a film about frustration, as Archibaldo, our protagonist, never satisfies his desire to murder, although his intended victims usually meet their demise by circumstance or a wicked contrivance. Imagine Norman Bates, in cheap mother's wig and gingham, creeping into cabin 1, ripping open the shower curtain not to find a shrieking Marion Crane, but instead to find her dead, her head cracked open against a faucet after she slipped on a thin sliver of motel soap. A dejected Norman (Norma?)stares at his feet and then shleps his way to back to the house. Such is what happens to young Archibaldo, whose murderous rage never finds proper closure (as they say nowadays).
Ensayo de un Crimen is also known as the last film of the Czech-born Mexican actress Miroslava Stern, also known simply as "Miroslava". A great beauty, featured on magazine covers the world over, she led a complicated and dispirited life. Shorty after the film's production finished, Miroslava was found dead in her residence in Mexico City, the cause of death an overdose of barbiturates. Speculation has it that she took an overdose of her sleeping pills when she learned of the marriage of a former lover (a Spanish toreador) to an Italian actress. She was not yet 30. Her valedictory appearance in Ensayo de un Crimen remains her most famous work. Oddly, the most memorable image in the film is the slow melting of Miroslava's wax likeness as Archibaldo, once again thwarted from murdering the real Miroslava, cremates her wax figure (which he stole from a department store window) in its stead. As per her wishes, Miroslava's remains were cremated.
More Buñuel goodness. I have uploaded 94 Buñuel poster images to my Flickr page, and you can see all of them there, if you just can't get enough of advertising Buñuel.
Of course, click on the image on the left for a larger verson. 136K.

Poster of the Week - Countess Dracula

2005-05-22T23:29:00.000-05:00

Poster of the Week! - Inspired by Curt's fantastic work feeding us all sorts of '70s era Dracula artifacts this month at his Groovy Age of Dracula (or Groovy Age of Horror), I offer this modest image of a British poster for the 1970 Hammer horror, Countess Dracula.

The film has nothing to do with Dracula, of course. It has something to do with Elizabeth Bathory, the real life monster who ordered the killing of more than 600 women and girls and bathed in their blood. Author Andrei Codrescu, who is also a descendent of the countess, wrote his first novel about her. Another descendent, Dennis Báthory-Kitsz, has composed an opera on Elizabeth Bathory, and also runs a fairly comprehensive site about Bathory and about his opera. A whole host of Bathory links can be found on the same site. For reviews of the movie (which, I confess, I haven't seen), you can go here, here, and here.Click on the image on the left for a larger image. 373K

Poster of the Week - Jekyll and Hyde (1931)

2005-05-16T23:14:00.000-05:00

Poster of the Week! -- The creepy image of Hyde as Jekyll's cubist shadow distinguishes this poster advertising the 1932 Swedish release of Rouben Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. American Cinematographer has a great and very informative article about the making of this landmark film, highlighting the groundbreaking and sometimes experimental work of its director, Mamoulian, and the film's cinematographer, Karl Struss.

Struss himself had a career in cinematography that spanned 5 decades with close to 140 credits, from silent classics like the original Ben-Hur and Murnau's Sunrise (for which he earned an Oscar) to some of Chaplin's sound films (The Great Dictator and Limelight) to humbler efforts in the tail end of his career like Rocketship X-M, The Fly, and The Alligator People. Before his cinematographic career, Struss was an accomplished and recognized pictorial photographer who sold work to the top fashion magazines of the day (the 1910s), and was a member of Alfred Stieglitz's group. Here's a long essay excerpted from an illustrated exhibition catalog. Here's an eerie shot of a waterfront on the East Side of New York; a clash of modernity and tradition in a seemingly random shot of a Columbus Day Parade in 1912; a color shot of the Boardwalk in Long Island from 1910; some Struss shots here; some more shots here; some nudes from 1914 here (very tasteful, but the models are nude); also, a short article on Struss' work in stereo photography and in 3-D movies.

Gabriel Figueroa

2005-05-10T23:48:00.000-05:00

Gabriel Figueroa is one of Mexico's greatest artists. Indeed, some have called him the "fourth muralist", after the three great ones, Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco. Figueroa was friendly with all three, and the cinematographer admittedly borrowed pictorial elements from the muralists, and, surprisingly, the painters admitted they borrowed from the filmmaker as well. As Figueroa's son revealed in an interview: "Whenever my father was invited to one of his exhibits, he would come in and Siqueiros would tell him, 'Now you come and see what I stole from you.' And my father would say 'Oh no. I come to see what I can steal from you.' Composition-wise and theme-wise.... The only time that my father recognized openly that he took a composition out of a painting, from a muralist, it was Orozco's. It was a water color that Orozco made of a funeral of Velorio. This water color is called The Requiem. And my father, in a picture called Flor Sylvestre with Dolores del Río, took this very same composition and interpreted it. So it happened that the day that the film was screened for the first time, Dolores del Río invited all her friends, and among her friends was Orozco. It happened that Orozco sat right next to my father. And when the scene came on, Orozco jumped out of his seat. My father said 'Maestro, I am an honest thief. I took that from one of your water colors'. Orozco said 'Of course, the depth and the volume you have in this composition is something that I didn't get in my water color. You must show me how you work so that I can see the magic of this scene.'"

Like the muralists, Figueroa's subject was Mexico itself, which he lit and photographed as the biggest, greatest movie star in the world. He made her landscapes gorgeous and, yes, even glamorous with a shimmering texture that rivaled the erotic; but also harsh, lonely, and sometimes cruel. But he was not merely a landscape photographer; he also explored the topographies of the human face, the luscious openess of smiles, the weight of centuries of sadness behind a poor woman's gaze, the grisly and grimmest gravity of a bad man's grin. Like the muralists, Figueroa took elements that seemed classically Mexican and made them universal.

There are many places where you can see some of the best of Figueroa's work. Here are a few: his official site, run by his son Gabriel Figueroa Flores, Jr., complete with a gallery of Quicktime video; a Spanish language site with plenty of images from the films and production shots as well; another Spanish language site with images and video; some erotic photgraphy by Figueroa (very tasteful, mind you); also, the odd apocryphal story that Figueroa had a hand in the creation of The Creature from the Black Lagoon; more trivia: he also helped shoot Johnny Weismuller's last Tarzan movie (along with Raul Martinez Solares, who photographed many of the Mexican horror and wrestling films from the '50s through the '70s)

Poster of the Week - Belle du Jour

2005-05-09T00:05:00.001-05:00

Poster of the Week! -- A stylish and striking Japanese advertisement for Luis Buñuel's Belle du Jour.
Buñuel on Belle du Jour (from the excellent book of interviews with Buñuel, Objects of Desire: Conversations with Luis Buñuel by Jose de la Colina and Tomas Perez Turrant:
Colina: Of course it's useless to ask you what is in the small box that the Asian client shows Severine.
Buñuel: (He laughs) I know the little box is upsetting, especially because of the buzzing noise it makes. After seeing the little box, one prostitute rejects the Asian, but Severine looks inside and accepts what the client proposes. I myself don't know what is in the little box. It must be something extraordinary, something used for an unheard-of perversity. It produced more curiosity than I expected. Once, Dr. Mendez, head of pharmacology at the Mexican Cardiological Institute, invited me to lunch at his home. The great cardiologist Dr. Chavez had also been invited because he wanted to talk to me. Chavez arrived late, hung up his Spanish-style cape, excused himself for being late... When he was seated, he suddenly asked me, "Listen, Buñuel, what is in the little box?" He surprised me: an eminent scientist, a savant, preoccupied with the contents of the little box.
...
Turrent: I have asked several friends about this and we all agreed that there must be some insect in box. A bumblebee, for example.
Buñuel: It could be, because there is buzzing. Now I ask you: what can I do with a bumblebee?
Colina: To me, it seems clear as day: the Asian wants to put the bumblebee into Severine's sex organ.
Buñuel: And the bumblebee would devour her sex: Zzzzzzzzz! (laughs) It's not a bad little depravity.
Some interesting reviews of Belle du Jour from Slant, and Mondo Digital. Also, a French Catherine Deneuve tribute site has some wonderful production shots and stills from the movie (I particularly like this shot of Buñuel and a radiant looking Deneuve) and some excerpts from interviews with Deneuve concerning the film.
As always, click on the image on the left for a larger version. 271K.

¡El Cine Mexicano en TCM!

2005-05-04T22:43:00.000-05:00

A viewing tip for those of you with cable... As reported by Flickhead a couple of days ago, Turner Classic Movies will be broadcasting 5 (count them 5!) Luis Buñuel films: Los Olvidados, Nazarín, Viridiana , El Angel Exterminador and Simón del Desierto. Fantastic films all, and none available on DVD in the US.

And it's not just Buñuel -- TCM is also planning a month long tribute to the best of the Mexican cinema. Certainly, the Cinco de Mayo holiday provides a convenient placemat for this embarrassment of riches, but who cares? It's high time that Mexican films are receiving some mainstream recognition in the US, along with such great actors and personalities such as Cantinflas, Maria Felix, Pedro Armendáriz, Jorge Negrete, Pedro Infante, Silvia Pinal (who appears in several of the Buñuel films already mentioned) and Tin Tan, directors like Fernando de Fuentes, Emilio "El Indio" Fernandez and Roberto Gavaldon, and the ridiculously great cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. I grew up on the border and saw many of these movies on Mexican TV, and for a lot of people of my parents' generation and older, these figures were stars that rivaled the brilliance of those coming from Hollywood. If your knowledge of Mexican films is limited to recent arthouse hits and horror and wrestler movies (great and fun as they may be), treat yourself to some of the best pictures of the Golden Age of Mexican Film, la Epoca de Oro. And for those of you without cable TV (like me), ¡la vida no vale nada!

Big in Japan!!!

2005-05-02T22:17:00.000-05:00

Babelfish translates the title of this fantastic and cool blog from Japan as "Monstrous Beast", which may or may not be the best translation. At any rate, this site specializes in monsters from Japan, and even if reading machine translations from the Japanese is not your cup of tea, at least you can feast your eyes on a bunch of images of the most delirious creatures ever dreamed up by Nippon's most creative minds. Very cool stuff!! Via Filmtagebuch.

Poster of the Week! - Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse

2005-05-01T22:39:00.001-05:00

Poster of the Week!-- Creepy German Expressionism illustrates this 1933 poster for Fritz Lang's Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse. This was the last film Lang made in Germany until the late '50s, when he returned to make his "Indian" films and one more Mabuse (the excellent The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, Lang's last film, and a blueprint for a lot of the pulp cinema of the '60s). Testament was also the film that Lang claimed to have placed Nazi slogans into the mouth of the raving madman and arch-criminal Mabuse (some historians doubt this). More Mabuse stuff: A review of the dubbed American version of Testament, The Crimes of Dr. Mabuse in Bright Lights Film Journal; a review of the 1962 remake of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, known in the US as Terror of the Mad Doctor; Who is Doctor Mabuse?; images from a 1000 Eyes/Return of Dr. Mabuse double feature pressbook (Gert "Goldfinger" Frobe vs. Dr. Mabuse! - Dr. Mabuse is on the loose! His Evil and Fiendish Power Unleashes a Blood-Bath of Chemical and Electronic Terror!!); actually, a bunch of cool Mabuse content from Evilskip's Movie Joint. As always, click on the image on the left for a larger version. 306K.

More Drunks in Film

2005-04-28T22:06:00.000-05:00

More drunks!-- Well not exactly, but a wonderful bit of conjecture from the fine folks at Hell On Earth (last updated 2003-10-20 --the prominence of their t.A.T.u story gives them away). Based on especially selected screengrabs, the authors surmise that the principal cast of that grand TV remake The Avengers were royally tanked during that film's production, which, of course, would account for that epic's spectacular failure (although I would suspect the ego engorging effects of devil cocaine, just like in the '80s). See Ralph and Uma with half lidded eyes and knotted brows straight out of the Foster Brooks School of Acting, and Connery's looking rightly disheveled. From the same site, you can also find evidence of more rampant dipsomania in the Bruckheimer classic Con Air, with cool macho drunk Americans like Cusack, Rhames, Cage, and Malkovich (?), rather than the effete (Long Island Iced?) tea-sipping Britishers from The Avengers.

Drinking on the Set!

2005-04-27T22:58:00.000-05:00

Invariably, when you read enough movie production histories (particularly the low-budget genre kind), it doesn't take long before you come across a sentence like this: "... it was an open secret that [name your favorite down on their luck actor] was drinking on the set....". The drunk actor was practically a stereotype since the days of Barrymore, and that stereotype never flourished more than in the meatgrinder world of Hollywood filmmaking. Especially in the back stages of poverty row grade-Z productions, with their skimpy budgets and truncated schedules and their harsh and unreal expectations, many actors would find solace in booze, finding in the bottle either a kind and gentle anesthetic, or a fuel for bravura. And often these actors were once major stars, commanding fortunes and enjoying the adulation of millions. When they once were scented with the sweet perfume of success, they now wallowed in the shit stink of cardboard sets, six-day shooting schedules, the sweaty indifference of journeyman technicians, and the paltriest of paychecks. Call it a weakness, if you must, but who could begrudge them a sip or two.

One of the more vivid images I remember from reading Gregory Mank's excellent history of the Universal Frankenstein series It's Alive! more than 20 years ago was the sight of Lon Chaney Jr., in full Monster makeup and costume, taking a couple of nips from a pint bottle behind the sets of The Ghost of Frankenstein. It goes without saying that this was the pinnacle of Chaney's movie career (he was now Universal's leading horror actor). It was downhill from there. One of the more infamous examples of mixing liquor and acting was Chaney's appearance in the 1950s program Tales of Tomorrow's live production of Frankenstein, where Chaney once again played the Monster. His performance was erractic, even surreal at times. He often looked plaintively straight at the camera, as if looking for direction. Some say Chaney had a bit too much to drink before the performance, and was not fully aware that this was not a dress rehearsal but a performance being broadcast live to millions. At any rate, Chaney's performance made this Tale of Tomorrow the most memorable of the series.

Some more set boozing anecdotes:

Not Elvis! Q: How was Elvis on the set?
Stella Stevens: It was fine working with Elvis. He was nice, but he also was drinking on the set. Anything that Elvis said had to go through the Colonel. He was not allowed to speak for himself. If Elvis had a drink -- and believe me, in Hawaii he loved those rum punch drinks -- it would be swept away and a bottle of Coca Cola would be set there in front of him. He was drunk when he sang "Return to Sender" and not a really professional actor. When I left it after the 6th day, I said, "I?ll just forget about it." Did you ever try to forget about an Elvis Presley film? It totally is impossible. Totally impossible. (she laughs)

Mitchum vs. Otto... Director Otto Preminger had declared there was to be no drinking on the set of River of No Return. One day he saw an actor crossing the set with a glass of vodka. He lambasted the actor who said, "I'm just taking this to Mitchum." The director paused and said, "Oh, that's different," and allowed the actor to complete his mission. Preminger had learned not to cross Mitchum in the earlier Angel Face.

In like Flynn! Australian actor Errol Flynn was frequently banned from drinking on the set. Necessity being the mother of invention, the savvy star soon developed a solution: Injecting oranges with vodka and eating them during his breaks.

The short and tragic life of Superman... While George Reeves played the heroic role of a Superman, a dark side began to emerge. In an interview with Phyllis Coates, she recalls that, "Every day at four o'clock George had open bar in his dressing room on the set. And nobody could stop him." That apparently caused some friction with production manager Barney Sarecki who deplored drinking on the set and felt that George's antics brought shooting to a halt whether they were ready to stop or not. Coates also recalled that Toni Mannix was usually with George when shooting wrapped, keeping up with Reeves, drink for drink. It was not uncommon for Reeves to host parties and card games at his home at 1579 Benedict Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills which lasted late into the night. Reeves was also known to enjoy the nightlife of Los Angeles sometimes being seen with some very shady characters. In addition, Reeves continued his affair with Toni Mannix, whose husband, Eddie Mannix, was also said to have ties to the mob.

And not just in Hollywood... Writer-director Francis Veber has the highest respect for Gallic veteran Gerard Depardieu - with one qualification.
"I think he's one of the best actors in the world, especially when he doesn't drink," Veber says. "I love him and respect him, but some of my colleagues have had the bad luck of having him drunk on the set.
"I think it's very difficult to be Gerard Depardieu. He's a very big man, but at the same time he's a very fragile man.
"If he has problems at home, he can drink two bottles of wine then turn up on the set."

Spock??? Mind Meld plays like outtakes from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier's cheesy campfire bonding sequence until you realize Nimoy has started discussing being drunk on the set in 1967.

And not just in the old days... Terminator star Michael Biehn is being sued by a Russian production company, who are accusing him of being drunk on the set of a new movie. CTB Film claim Biehn - who played the man sent back through time to stop Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator character in the 1984 blockbuster - made sexual advances toward production staff while drunk on the set of Amerikanets. According to the suit, filed in Los Angeles, Biehn showed up drunk on the second day of filming in Russia and was "excessively intoxicated, his speech slurred and erratic, and he had trouble walking". He is also alleged to have carried a Pepsi Cola bottle containing vodka and made advances on female production employees - behavior which continued for several days. CTB claim scenes with Biehn shot in Russia were useless, forcing the company to suspend production. In Amerikanets, Biehn as an American stockbroker who loses millions when a Russian company he invests in declares bankruptcy, and then travels to Russia to seek justice.

Take this with a grain of salt... "It was OK when she wasn't drunk on the set. I think she's an alcoholic -- it was either that, or she was on cough syrup the whole time," Gallo allegedly said about Ricci.

The great ones can even use an actor's drunkeness as inspiration.... Fellini: It?s always satisfying when you can turn something that goes wrong into something that is even better. If I saw that an actor like Broderick Crawford was a little drunk on the set, I tried to make it part of the story.

And it's not just actors.... JM: You got to work with Stanton again on Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid [1973] for director Sam Peckinpah. In fact, you did two other movies with Peckinpah in the '70s [Convoy (1978) and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)]. Tell me about working with him. The stories of his drinking on the set are legendary.
Kris Kristofferson:They're true, too. I had to take a pistol away from Sam once: He was lying sick in bed and took a shot at Harry Dean Stanton and my piano player, Donnie Fritts. I got a call about it and went over there and said, "All right, where is it?" He was heavily anesthetized with Mescal or something. Sam was a good man; he just needed turmoil around him.

And another cinema great.... Mickey Rooney recalls that Buzz [Busby Berkeley] was often drunk on the set and once almost fell from one of the girders where he had climbed to set up shots of the dancers. To avoid a serious accident, the grips put a rope around his waist, tossed it over a"strut" and held it while he crawled about from girder to girder. Then they picked out the biggest extra around to hold the rope. However, several times Buzz fell off and dangled up there while the big guy held on for dear life.

For some more drinking tales, here's a nice piece called Drunks On The Set.

Skidoo - Poster of the Week

2005-04-24T23:28:00.000-05:00

Poster of the Week!-- Timothy Leary: "I was fooled by Otto Preminger. He was much hipper than I was." I haven't seen Otto Preminger's Skidoo, but I certainly want to. It undoubtedly belongs in that small circle of films that's more talked about than seen (movies like Salo, Singapore Sling, Myra Breckinridge, and The Cremaster Cycle). I first heard about Skidoo years and years ago in the Medved Brothers' Golden Turkey Awards (a book, I must admit, that became a core of my film education when I was a teenager because of it's concentration on little known genre films and obscurities, but which holds little value today because of its snarky condescension and middlebrow elitism, which is much more value than I hold for brother Michael's role as moral arbiter nowadays). Of course, the Medveds trashed it, but the film intrigued me then, and it intrigues me now. In case you don't know about it, Skidoo was Preminger's paean to LSD. Preminger had experimented with LSD under the supervision of Timothy Leary in the mid 1960s, and came away thinking the world of it. Now, he wanted to make a film about it. But instead of some overly serious investigation of the lysergic experience (which was the norm back then, especially in rock music), he made his acid movie a wacky comedy which featured the talents of Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Mickey Rooney, Frankie Avalon, and Groucho Marx as a mob boss named "God". It's this odd melange of old school gin-soaked Hollywood hipsterism and 1968 psychedelia that gives Skidoo it's unique place in movie history, or, at least, in the history of drug cinema. Will it ever be released on DVD? Chances are, sadly enough, not anytime soon.

Some more Skidoo stuff: The Smoking Gun has some FBI memoranda about Skidoo, mainly concerning how the FBI was portrayed in the film (not very well, apparently); Kempa has an mp3 of Harry Nilsson singing the end credits from the film; here's the cover and liner notes by Laugh-In announcer Gary Owens of the soundtrack album; also, a piece by Paul Krassner about tripping with Groucho Marx. Groucho, an intensely curious man, wanted to see what was the big deal about acid. One of his revelations that afternoon involved his role as "God" in Skidoo: "I'm really getting quite a kick out of this notion of playing God like a dirty old man in Skidoo. You wanna know why? Do you realize that irreverence and reverence are the same thing?"

"Always?"

"If they're not, then it's a misuse of your power to make people laugh"

Then, after that exchange, Krassner reports, Groucho's eyes began to tear.

As always, click on the image on the left for a larger version (550K). And if anyone knows where I can get a decent looking copy of Skidoo cheap, let me know.

Twin Psychos

2005-04-21T21:21:00.000-05:00

Quick online viewing tip-- An effortless looking melding of the shower murder sequence from Hitchcock's and Van Sant's Psycho(s) from filmmaker Frank Hudec. It's interesting to note that most of the images in the Hitchcock version are flipped so we can see one shot as the mirror image of the other. It's also obvious how Janet Leigh is so much more expressive than Anne Heche, from the sensual abandon she exhibits in the shower leading up to her abject terror during the attack. It's a testimony to the acting chops of the late, great Ms. Leigh. Heche, on the other hand, seems to be phoning it in; or maybe it's just '90s post-ironic cool. Speaking of '90s cool, Van Sant's artsy inserts during the scene (a cow on the road, a tempetuous sky), were excised in favor of a more seamless sequence (I suspect some heavy duty and meticulous editing went into the making of this piece).

There are some other short pieces on Hudec's site worth taking a gander at, including a sort of dance remix of scenes from The Usual Suspects.

Yeah, I found this through Metafilter.

Introducing 'Tippi' Hedren

2005-04-19T23:06:00.001-05:00

One morning in 1961, Alfred Hitchcock watched the Today Show on NBC and saw a commercial which would not only change his life, but irrevocably the life of the actress in the commercial. The actress' name was Tippi Hedren. She explains in an interview with Joe Bob Briggs:

And he saw one particular . . .
TIPPI: One of them was a Pet milk product called Sego. It was a diet drink. And it was a story line; it wasn't just holding up a product and talking about it. It was a story and apparently he saw it.
But what exactly did you do in the commercial to make such an impression?
TIPPI: Apparently, the action that attracted him was I'm walking down the street and a little boy whistles at me and I turn to react to him and smile, and that's what apparently caught his eye.
Really?
TIPPI: Yeah.
If you look at all his leading ladies, like Grace Kelly and Kim Novak and Eva Marie Saint and Janet Leigh, he had a thing for blondes didn't he?
TIPPI: Oh didn't he?

Some screenshots of that very commercial can be found in this elegant French 'Tippi' Hedren site (yet another tribute site!), which also has shots from some of her screen tests (directed by Hitchcock himself), along with plenty of production stills and publicity shots from The Birds and Marnie. If you're not familiar with the strange relationship between Hitchcock and Hedren, here's a recent interview with Hedren from the Times Online (the title of which, "The birds attacked me but Hitch was scarier". should give you a clue.

Poster of the Week

2005-04-18T01:12:00.000-05:00

Poster of the Week! The feast continues unabated. Continuing with the literary shenanigans,here's the 1966 French poster of Francois Truffaut's adaption of Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451. It has a lot of faults but I love this movie. Nicholas Roeg's photography, and, above all, Herrmann's music makes it. "Thank you for giving my film a heart," Truffaut supposedly said to Herrmann. Truffaut was no slouch himself. The film's film's final sequence, with the serendipitous falling snow (it wasn't planned; it just snowed that day), the murmurs of the book people reciting their texts, and Herrmann's glorious music, is one of the most beautiful in cinema, a tribute to film and to literature.

Here's a cool looking Italian tribute to the film. Of course, click on the image on the left for a larger image. 798K.

Propagating the Meme

2005-04-18T00:08:00.000-05:00

Propagating the meme... Is it anything like admonishing the bishop?

From a suggestion from Mr. BaliHai, he with the fantastic and bloodshot Eye of the Goof.

Okay, I'll play...

1) You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451; which book do you want to be?

Because I'm a supremely lazy man, and because it's short and its simple and conversational style probably would make it an easy book to memorize, I would have to answer: Post Office by Charles Bukowski. Sure, Ham and Rye is a better book, but I really love Post Office. Such a caustic little thing. And it's extraordinarily funny, so I'll be a big hit at Book People parties and get-to-togethers. So, do I get to hang out with Julie Christie.

2) Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Julie Christie (the short haired one) from Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451.

3) What are you currently reading?

Halfway through Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver. I like it, but it's slow going. It's dense as all fuck. Also: almost finished with Eduardo Galeano's Century of the Wind, a history of Latin America during the 20th Century in vignettes. Poetic and disturbing. It's the third volume of Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy.

4) The last book you bought was:

The aforementioned Quicksilver. Also, on the same trip, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light

5) The last book you read was:

The aforementioned Hitchcock biography. Big revelations: Hitch was probably impotent. Consequently, Alma had a brief affair. Also, Hitchcock wasn't a big a freak as Spoto made him out to be. Consequently, it's not as interesting as Spoto's book. More McGilligan revelations: Hitch dug the new cinema coming out of Europe in the '60s: Godard, Truffaut (of course), Fellini, and especially Antonioni. Wanted to make artier films, but Universal wouldn't let him (also combined with Hitchcock's own timidity, fear of confrontation, and, striking him for the first time in his career -probably because of the younger filmmakers coming out of Europe, his own artistic insecurity). One of his favorite movies at the end of his life was Benji (he was a great dog lover).

6) Five books you would take to a desert island:

Probably Ulysses, maybe Faulkner's Novels 1930-1935 from Library of America (cheating somewhat, I know; then, Absalom, Absalom, otherwise), a volume of the complete works of Shakespeare, an athoritative guide to survival on a deserted isle, and, for entertainment's sake, a complete guide to psychotropic plants.

7) Who are you going to pass this stick to, and why?

It seems mightily presumptuous to foist this on anyone, and I'm reluctant to do so. On the other hand, with an internationalist bent in mind, I wouldn't mind reading Carmen's, Patricio's, or Thomas' responses to these queries.

Soon, a cinematic toss from M. Valdemar...

Filmprogramme

2005-04-17T09:36:00.000-05:00

Here's something cool -a gallery of scans of German film programs from the '30s to the '60s. Another fantastic find from the wonderful folks at RetroGrafix , where you can also find complete scans of the programs of films like Von Winde Verweht (Gone With The Wind), and An einem Tag wie jeder andere (The Desperate Hours).

Along the same vein, here are two collections of vintageautographed pictures of mainly German filmstars.

Luis Buñuel is Still a Great Director (thank god)

2005-04-14T00:29:00.000-05:00

Finalmente, Don Luis has made the cut. Not "slicing up eyeballs", I want you to know, but Luis Buñuel finally has an entry in the Senses of Cinema's Great Directors database. If you're not familiar with Great Directors: A Critical Database, it's quite possibly the best and most thorough historical, biographical, and critical survey of movie director you're likely to find on the web. Here, you're likely to find Bob Clampett elbow to elbow with Jean Cocteau, Lucio Fulci sitting next to Sam Fuller, Keaton right beside Kiarostami, just to pick up semi-random pairings from the database's alphabetical listing (and looking over these pairings again, I find that there may be more simularities between these pairs than may have met the eye --but that's for another time). Let's here it from the Senses people themselves: "Importantly, the database does not endorse any sort of classical “Director canon”. The profiles present Directors from across the intellectual spectrum: those praised, those reproached, those not considered, those unheard of. Common to them all is a unique vision and meaningful contribution to cinema."

Also this: "...the database is concerned with bodies of work and an auterist approach to experiencing cinema: that one can seek out films according to their directorial credit and that this endeavour results in an aggrandised fascination with the films – and subsequently cinema in general – as one encounters ideas, themes, statements, faces, gestures and formal devices repeated, augmented, reversed or illuminated by those in the Director's other works. The underlying principle is that such an approach yields a kind of cinephilic “multiplier effect”. For those lucky enough to be discovering cinema, the Great Directors profiles can provide a good structuring framework with which to manoeuvre through this most labyrinthine of artforms."

Get thee there now, if you've never been.

More Buñuel soon....

Poster of the Week!

2005-04-12T22:05:00.000-05:00

Poster of the week! Alas, a bit late on serving the feast this weekend, so a Poster of the Week would have to suffice.

Charles Chaplin called him the "funniest man in the world", and his stage name became a Spanish verb (cantinflear - an act of doubletalk; a torrent of verbiage for a prolonged amount of time that fails to make any sort of sense at all). Of course, we are referring to the great Mexican movie comedian Mario Moreno Reyes 'Cantinflas'.

U.S. film fans are probably more familiar with Cantinflas' turns in Hollywood pictures like Around the World in 80 Days and Pepe, both in which he co-starred with the biggest stars in Hollywood. Although he was quite a remarkable physical comedian, it was his verbal acuity, wordplay and twisting of logic and syntax that made him the biggest comedy star in Mexico and throughout Latin America. Translating Cantinflas' unique brand of verbal humor into American English was close to an impossible task ("like translating Groucho Marx into Chinese," someone put it), so instead the American producer-directors (Mike Todd and George Sidney, the men behind 80 days and Pepe, respectively) insisted on a broader physical sort of comedy. If it worked at all, it was because of Cantinflas' talents and comic instincts solely. Pepe is a plodding nag of a picture that was intended as a breakthrough star vehicle for Cantinflas, but was so dull and ponderous (almost 3 hours long!) that it can almost serve as a textbook example in how not to make a comic film. Some consider 80 Days to be the worst film ever to win a Best Picture Oscar. Well... maybe. At any rate, Cantinflas is the best thing in the movie, and the only reason that I find to stick with long drawn out mess whenever it shows up on TV (which used to be often, but not so much anymore, except maybe on TCM.

There's not much Cantinflas' Mexican work on DVD, although you can possibly find copies of his early films with gray market dealers (like this one from Argentina, which has some pretty cool screenshots and title cards). There's also very little about Cantinflas on the web. There's some information from Answers.com (by way of wikipedia), a page on Cantinflas cartoons that were very popular in the '60s, a NY Times article about a one man show entitled "¡Cantinflas!" (which looks very good, by the way), and a poem by Victor Hernandez Cruz.

Throwing my meager penny into the pot, I offer a Cantinflas paper doll cutout from a program for the 1944 film Gran Hotel, which I have available as both jpeg and pdf, so you can print it, cut it up, and dress Cantinflas up as a bellboy, waiter, vagabond, or debonair man about town. But wait! There's more! As a special extra bonus, I've also thrown in the original poster from Gran Hotel

The Pursuit of Inner Peace Through Movie Stars

2005-04-06T23:36:00.000-05:00

Certainly, movie star tribute sites are a dime a dozen on the wild and wonderful worldwide web, but I love them anyway for their inspired amateurism, dedication, and plain old obsessiveness. The Meeker Museum is a tribute site of sorts, looking on the surface like a digital salute to Ralph Meeker (star of Kiss Me Deadly , my all time favorite noir, and the most singularly unique film to come out of Hollywood in the '50s). Nothing truly odd about that; it has pictures, a brief bio, a filmography, synopses of important films -- everything you would expect (including the crawling marquee text). Dig a little deeper and you will find pages devoted to stars (or demi-stars?) you've either never heard of or at least haven't thought of in years. Diane Varsi, anyone? Old Sinbad Kerwin Mathews? As Jack Stalnaker, the site's proprietor, puts it:"Some were extraordinarily gifted and some are still working, still displaying their abundant gifts for generally unappreciative audiences. However, we don't preoccupy ourselves too heavily with questionable concepts like 'talent.' Maybe some of these people just looked good in the photographs, which is all that really matters anyway."

It's old school camp, the likes we haven't seen since (maybe) the days of glam, and a sort of sensibility that had its apotheosis in the mid-60s Factory days in New York. There's a lot of cool stuff here, including a then and now pictorial between scenes of Peyton Place and modern day Camden, Maine (not much has changed). A personal aside: my great-grandfather appeared in one of the last shots of Peyton Place (he's the old guy giving the Yankee staredown to Hope Lange as she descends the courthouse steps). My dad's family was from nearby Rockland (home of the Maine Lobster Festival). My dad used to tell me, "Hope Lange swam naked in our drinking water!" A point of obvious civic pride.

Online Viewing Fun

2005-04-05T23:24:00.000-05:00

Some online viewing fun. First up, shades of The Brain That Wouldn't Die! Junior scientist attempts conversation with the comely Eva, a Nasa funded robot meant to mimic human emotions and interactions. The verisimilitude is amazing, as well as creepy. "What does the future hold, Eva?" the interrogator asks. "I will get much smarter and interesting over time," she replies. "Of this, I am sure." If only this was true for the rest of us.

Madonna consuming raw eggs and spitting them up back in Michigan many years ago, when she was broke, brunette and beautiful. Some proto-trangressive cinema shot on 8mm? A student film by someone who just saw Un Chien Andalou at the studnt union's experimental film nite? Or a really, really lame attempt at arty porn (a la Metzger or Borowczyk)? You be the judge. See it courtesy of the fine folks at WFMU.

...but also... Pretty grand clips of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's 1960s British comedy show Not Only... But Also. If you're adventurous enough and don't mind the occasional F and C word (well, more than occasional I would venture), then listen in to some outtakes from Pete and Dud's 1970s Derek & Clive albums. Courtesy of the fine folks at The Establishment.

Here's the only film appearance of jazz era songstress Annette Hanshaw. She had an incredible voice that seemed really ahead of her time, and I am truly impressed by her. Here's a bunch of mp3s of some of her old sides (a caveat: the sound quality's not great), and you can find a lot of info on the great Miss Hanshaw here.

Weekend Poster Feast 10

2005-04-04T00:48:00.000-05:00

Weekend Poster Feast 10. "The Hottest Exposure Since Man Created Film!" Such hyperbole was common when applied to the films of Brigitte Bardot back in the '50s as she was ascending to take her well appointed seat as the reigning international sex queen. Frankly, I haven't seen Les Bijoutiers du clair de lune (or, The Night Heaven Fell, as it was known in the US), but this French poster is a striking piece of movie advertising art. Here's an interesting comment from her co-star Stephen Boyd: "All I can say is that when I'm trying to play serious love scenes with her, she's postioning her bottom for the best-angle shots." A good BB appreciation here from Swinging Chicks. Also, a wonderfully specific gallery of Brigitte in opera gloves.

As always, click on the image on the left for a larger version. 237K.

A Separate Cinema

2005-03-31T22:43:00.000-06:00

It's one thing for a "marginal cinema" to willfully want to exist on the edges of popular consciousness, quite another thing altogether for a cinema to be made by and for a people that have been pushed to the margins by racism and prejudice. Since 1976, The Separate Cinema Archives have been dedicated to collecting, cataloging and exhibiting the history of this latter brand of "marginal cinema". Their website contains a wide assortment of African-American movie posters, from "race pictures" from the early days of movies to '70s blaxploitation to current Hollywood hits. The Smithsonian has a cool collection as well. The Black Film Center/Archive is another excellent resource, which includes a fascinating (but also somewhat disturbing) collection of very early motion pictures (1890s) featuring African-Americans, or sometimes whites in blackface.

Meet the Monsters

2005-03-30T23:59:00.000-06:00

No matter how incredulous the creature, or hamfisted the horror, poverty row moviemakers in the '50s knew that their audience dug monsters, sometimes the sillier and more ludicrous the better. How else to better explain the existence of the vegetable creature from It Conquered the World or the ridiculous giant buzzard from The Giant Claw, much less the killer tree from From Hell it Came ("...and to hell it should go!" was a common rejoinder by many a wag who reviewed the picture in newsprint). Although no one considers this films art, they are often recalled with some measure of fondness. It's almost as if these productions were, in the end, a shared joke between the makers and the audience, despite the fact that the movies were often played ramrod straight (dramatically, at least). Even without a self-conscious wink or elbow nudge, the audience roared (or at least tittered) at the appearance of these outerworldly beasts, and the producers didn't care. They knew they got away with it again.

Getting away with it was the secret to successful monster making back in those days. One guy who got away with a lot was Jack Kirby, especially in those days before he became "King" Kirby . Before the Fantastic Four took off, Kirby was busy grinding out monster comics for Marvel, all of which are detailed and celebrated at the Monster Blog. In the Meet The Monsters of the same site, you would glean through an index of Kirby drawn monsters such as Glob, the Menace from the Molten Depths, Gomdulla, the Living Pharoah (a giant mummy), Moomba, the Wicked Wooden Statue, and Shagg, the Killer Sphinx. And a whole lot more.

Lollywood Billboard Art

2005-03-28T23:33:00.000-06:00

"Billboard painting takes place wherever there is something to advertise - but the best of the typical cinema style is created at the nerve centre, the heartbeat of Lollywood, - Royal Park within Laxmi Chowk in Lahore's busy old sector. This hub of narrow, overcrowded, filthy streets is a concentration of film trade offices and hardly an inch of wall space is to be found without some huge Technicolor superhero staring down at you, gun or dagger in hand!"

Lollywood is, of course, Pakistan's counterpart to India's Bollywood, and Lollywood movie advertising is as colorful, if not more so, than India's. Here's an excellent introduction to Lollywood billboard art, complete with two galleries. The site's proprietors (who include film historian Omar Khan, who provided the marvelous background and audio commentary to Mondo Macabro's excellent DVD edition of The Living Corpse, Pakistan's first and only vampire film) are also selling hand painted oil reproductions of the paintings. The site also includes an extensive collection of vintage printed Bollywood and Lollywood posters.

Weekend Poster Feast 9

2005-03-27T23:56:00.000-06:00

Weekend Poster Feast 9. "Diabolical Vampire! More dangerous than Dracula!" You'd better believe it! Blacula's one of my favorite vampire films of the '70s, if only because of William Marshall's grand performance. Here's a classically trained actor giving his all in a cheap AIP vampire picture, lending the accursed Mamuwalde a pathos and nobility other actors (even the "classically" trained") rarely approach. No slumming for Mr. Marshall. Click on the image on the left for a much larger version. 537K.

Classic Experimental Films for Download

2005-03-26T20:57:00.000-06:00

For your online viewing pleasure: while some of you may be familiar with the collection of Fluxus films at the Ubuweb (a repository of all things avant and all that), Ubuweb has now just launched a new section of classic avant garde films, including films by Buñuel, Man Ray, Kenneth Anger, Guy Debord, Jack Smith and many more. Dig the caveat: "We've mostly plucked these from file-sharing. As such, UbuWeb is not responsible for the quality of the films. Nor do we guarantee that each part will work. No complaints, please."

Also this: "If you have a better quality rip or other films that you'd like to donate to this collection, please contact us. We'd be happy to host it." All I have to say is, if you have 'em, share 'em.

Vincent Price at the American Cinematheque

2005-03-25T14:10:00.000-06:00

A heads up for L.A. dwelling horror fans: Tales of Terror: The Films of Vincent Price begins tonight with two of Price's best (and campiest) films from the '70s, Theatre of Blood (1973), and The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971). Saturday features two Price-William Castle collaborations, 1959's The Tingler, and The House on Haunted Hill (1958) (probably not featuring wired seats or a dangling skeleton, but I can't be sure). Also on Saturday is a Corman Poe double feature with Tales of Terror (1962) and, possibly the best of the Corman-Price-Poe films, The Masque of Red Death (1964). And the brutal Witchfinder General, directed by Michael Reeves, ends the series on Wednesday, featuring a new 35mm print and with actor Ian Ogilvy and producer PhillipWaddilove in attendance. If you can only go to one showing, see Witchfinder General, which is one of the best horror films from the '60s, and a real nasty piece of work. It's very atypical for Price, and it may contain his best performance. It has yet to be released on DVD in the U.S., which is a horrible shame.

Turkish Movie Posters

2005-03-24T20:52:00.000-06:00

Movie Posters from Turkey. An interesting gallery of posters from both Turkish and international films. They're also for sale.

Movie Gun Gallery

2005-03-22T21:18:00.000-06:00

Guns! You can't make a movie without them (along with the requisite girl, of course). Here's an interesting collection of cinema firearms from Bond's Walthers to The Wild Bunch's Browning machine gun (although the site's proprietor states that the film took place a few years before the weapon was manufactured). From Long Mountain Outfitters, who specialize in "Machine Guns - Silencers - Destructive Devices".

Join the fun at our Children's Matinee!

2005-03-21T22:04:00.000-06:00

Here was the scheme: buy the rights to a bunch of foreign fairy tale movies really cheap, dub them into English at the Coral Gables, Florida Soundlab studio, and then furiously market the hell out of them, insisting to theater owners on strict "weekend only" matinee showtimes. Then you sit back and watch the money roll in --which is what happened in the '50s through the early '70s to old school showman and huckster K. Gordon Murray (whom many of you know as the man who brought Mexican horror to the USA, turning El Santo into Samson). So successful was Mr. Murray's children's crusade that others followed suit with the weekend matinees, including the behemoth Disney. By the '70s, the big studios enforced exclusive contracts with the major theater and distribution chains that forbade "weekend only" engagements (which not only killed the kiddie matinees, but the midnight spook shows as well).

Most of the films presented at these matinees have drifted into dusty obscurity (except for the perversely bizarre Mexican film Santa Claus, which was Murray's biggest hit). Kiddiematinee.com is trying to remedy that, with an extraordinary database of almost every kid movie exhibited in the US, including some gems as Hershell Gordon Lewis' Santa Visits the Magic Land of Mother Goose, the weird Italian The Seven Dwarfs to the Rescue, and one I remember seeing in the mid '70s (on a double bill with Godzilla Vs. Megalon), West Germany's Superbug (which also holds the dubious distinction of being the first movie I ever walked out of).

Weekend Poster Feast 8

2005-03-20T20:51:00.000-06:00

Weekend Poster Feast 8. "Filmed in BLAZING TROPICOLOR! A NEW Kind of Jungle Drama - Actually Filmed in Guatemala and Featuring Members of the Savage Vicuni Indian Tribe!" Perhaps they should have thrown in "Filmed in South America, Where Life is Cheap!" if the publicists had the wherewithal. I don't know much about this feature, except that Something Weird released it as part of a "Primitive Triple Feature" DVD (a review of the disc can be found at DVD Drive-In). The poster's striking enough, though, with its white man vs. "savage" knife duel and the heaving bosom of the bound "virgin" towering above them. And people wonder why they don't make "jungle dramas" anymore. Click on the image for a much larger version. (800 K)

The Irish in Film

2005-03-17T18:50:00.000-06:00

Happy St. Patrick's Day! Here's a fine database of Irish cinema, of films made by the Irish, Irish-Americans, about the Irish, about the island itself, and everything in between. In short, movies to watch while pouring the black stuff into ye. Slainte Mhath! as the Micks would say.

TV or not TV

2005-03-16T22:46:00.000-06:00

More TV Movie Thrills-- Possibly the most frightening thing I saw on screen when I was very young was the first segment of the Night Gallery TV movie cum pilot. Perfect nightmare fodder: Ossie Davis, in abject horror, recognizing the thumping footfalls of a vengeful living dead Roddy McDowell and recognizing the dead man's progression in an ever shifting painting on the wall. Christ, that scared the bejesus out of me. Night Gallery was a fairly successful series (at least in my eye, due not so much for the stories --although some like the version of Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model" and that one with the giant white rat on the moon with the astronaut in the jumbo mousetrap gave me goosebumps-- but the very creepy paintings with which Rod Serling would introduce each story.

The Night Stalker was another TV movie that spawned a sequel and a series. The monsters weren't all that scary, but Darren McGavin pretty much carried the show. Strangely, two "movies" were compiled from four episodes of the Night Stalker series, Demon in Lace and Legacy of Terror, which were usually shown on late night TV.

Dark Shadows was another popular horror series (a daily half-hour soap opera). The series also inspired two films, House of Dark Shadows and Night of Dark Shadows, which were pretty gory drive-in and grindhouse fare back in the early '70s.

Extra bonus for you Dark Shadows fans! Here's an mp3 of Jonathan Frid's recorded thank you message for the Dark Shadows Vampire Fan Club in 1969. Also, a radio spot where we learn how the vampires "do it".

A tip of the hat to Mr. BaliHai for the post suggestion...

Made for TV

2005-03-15T22:57:00.000-06:00

Due to Mature Subject Matter Parental Discretion is Advised: a common disclaimer in '70s' network television, particularly in the made for TV movies that popped up four or five times a week on a prime time schedule, and one that drew impressionable youngsters (like me) like the proverbial flies to dung. While '70s cinema was wild and wooly in the theaters and the drive-ins, that no-holds-barred sensibility was also mirrored (although toned down considerably) in the "World Premiere" productions that were broadcast.

While nostalgia can be a rosy colored thing, there was a certain quality to these films that warms the memories of those of us who lived through that era. I cannot forget the crazy surrealistic shock I felt watching Frankenstein: The True Story back on NBC in the fall of '73, when the Monster (played by Michael Sarrazin) pulls off the head of Jane Seymour (playing the Elsa Lanchester part), or the evil Polidori (James Mason), in the middle of a tempestuous storm, being hoisted onto the top of a ship's mast whimpering "I'm afraid! I'm afraid!" and then being struck by a bolt of lightning and turned into a skeleton! Or the slow-motion thumping and moans of the living Gargoyles. Or the voluptuous horror of the fantastic Zuni fetish doll that dogged Karen Black throughout her house in Trilogy of Terror. Or classic Shatner as a drunken ex-priest who regains his faith as he confronts a ancient Druid demon and is sent spinning into the glorious sunrise in The Horror at 37,000 Feet (a mash of possession/occult horror and Airport style disaster drama --both of which genres were extraordinarily popular in 1974, when this little shocker was done).

Certainly horror was a popular TV movie genre. Indeed, one can make the argument that TV movies were merely tamed exploitation films, and that the TV screen was just a surrogate drive-in screen. One can point to the panoply of teenage alcoholics, runaways, prostitutes, rentboys, dope fiends and bulimics that crawled and staggered across American TV screens in the mid-seventies. There was even a Women-in-Prison (WIP) entry in 1974's Born Innocent in which a post Exorcist Linda Blair (who was only 14) is subjected to all sorts of degradations including a graphic toilet plunger rape. Try making a film like that for television nowadays (not that anyone should).

But even in the harshness of the subject matter, they were not necessarily cynical. On the contrary, these films were quite earnest in their twisted way. These were "problem films", movies that dealt with social issues and tried to call attention to them as a call to action. The political climate in the '70s was such that such an undertaking seemed almost noble. Today, in our cynical and selfish age, taking such a tact seems quaint, even naive, wrongheaded, and foolish.

As an aside to this sketchy discussion of TV movies, it's interesting to note that the opening to ABC's The Movie of the Week (which you can see in real media in TV Party along with some vintage promos) was designed by none other than Douglas Trumbull, who designed the slit-scan process utilized in the stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's quite easy to see the similarities.

Weekend Poster Feast 7

2005-03-14T10:34:00.000-06:00

Weekend Poster Feast 7. Better late than never! This time we enjoy the cool, elegant, and sexy lines of an Art Deco fuselage in a sheet advertising the 1937 British thriller Non-Stop New York, which deals with the intrigue and hijinks in an 18 hour transatlantic flight. Apparently the plane in the movie doesn't resemble the one shown on this poster, but is instead the height of opulance and luxury, complete with two levels, sleeping berths, a dining room, and even an outside balcony in order to take in the sights. Quite unlike the comfort we take for granted in air travel today! The film stars the pretty and livacious Anna Lee, who later was featured in the soap opera General Hospital. Click on the image on the left for a larger version. (204K)

Bunny Buzz

2005-03-10T22:21:00.000-06:00

Hey there googlers! I may have what you're looking for... The German blog Sin Alley has put up a bunch of screen shots from Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny. Yes, some of the images may not be worksafe, but there's nothing graphic from that scene with Chloe Sevigne, at least I don't think so. You regular movie mavens may want to check it out just to dig on Gallo's grimy and grainy mise-en scene. I haven't seen Brown Bunny yet, but it looks like Gallo wants to harken back to early '70s zoom lens, flattened washed out look (Buffalo '66 had the same), which is refreshing in this age of films that look like video games -sharp and shiny to the point of no return (or pointlessness, for that matter).

Romy Schneider (1938-1982)

2005-03-09T22:27:00.000-06:00

"I am nothing in in life, but everything on the screen," admitted Austrian film actress Romy Schneider in a moment of heartbreaking candor. Never a marquee player in Hollywood (she is possibly best known in the states for her roles in What's New, Pussycat, Otto Preminger's The Cardinal, the 1964 Jack Lemmon vehicle Good Neighbor Sam, and her turn in Orson Welles' production of The Trial), she was huge in Europe. She began her career playing royalty in German language films, and garnered her greatest fame and adulation playing Princess Elisabeth of Bavaria in the "Sissi-films", a series of three films made in the late '50s, a storybook history of the romance of young 'Sissi' and the dashing Emperor Franz Josef of Austria. With this stardom also came the freedom to try more challenging projects, such as working with Luchino Visconti on film with Boccaccio '70 and also on the Parisian stage, where she receives some critical kudos. Her work with Visconti will also allow her to reprise her "Sissi" role in Ludwig. Romy Schneider becomes a much in demand actress. In 1971, Paris Match emblazons this headline: "Forty years after Greta and Marlene, fifteen years after Marilyn, the cinema discovers a new star."

But this success belied a deep personal dissatisfaction and profound sadness. After a series of failed marriages and relationships, compounded with the accidental death of her son in 1981, Schneider reached this horrible conclusion: "It seems to be impossible for me to live with myself - let alone for anyone else." Also this: "Sissi ? I?ve not been Sissi for a long time now ? I am an unhappy 42-year-old woman and my name is Romy Schneider." She smoked three packs of Marlboros a day, drank heavily, and popped barbituates and stimulants. In May of 1982 she died in her Paris apartment at the age of 43, officially due to "natural causes".

There are plenty of interweb shrines celebrating this enigmatic and beautiful actress. The best is Das Romy Schneider Archiv (in German), which collects a ton of images, including portraits, posters, and an excellent collection of German magazine covers. Plus, an assortment of wallpapers for your desktop.

There's also the Romy Schneider Bilderseite, which has a lot of images not found on the Archiv, including a gallery of cardboard picture discs and 45rpm picture sleeves (like most stars of the time, Romy tried her hand as a pop songstress). Also this series of screenshots from The Trial, especially those of a young Romy babying a prone Welles. You go, Orson!

The Magnificent Ambersons

2005-03-08T23:14:00.000-06:00

Here's a fantastic resource for images and info on Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons. The site includes the requisite posters and lobbycards, but also included are magazine ads and scanned articles from fan magazines, including one entitled "Is Orson Welles a Menace?" There's also a trailer that gives us just a taste of the footage that was ultimately edited out (the final scene where Joseph Cotten visits Agnes Moorehead in a cheap boarding house --a scene that Welles thought was the best in the film and possibly the best he ever directed).