I, Not Amused

I have to admit it's been 20+ years since I've read Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, but when I recently viewed the trailer for the new film version (you can watch it here, if you so desire) I found myself a bit perplexed. I saw nothing of Asimov's collection of robot stories within the standard Will Smith sci-fi actioner except the inclusion of the classic 3 Laws of Robotics, which every SF fan knows by heart. And even then, the 3 laws are thrown out the window when the robots start killing people.

Apparently, the title of the movie is I, Robot not because it was an adaptation of Asimov's book, but because the director, Alex Proyas, probably thought it was a kick-ass title for a summer blockbuster. Jayme Lynn Blaschke of RevolutionSF has a fairly comprehensive wrap-up of what seems to be another classic case of Hollywood bending over backwards to do anything but the right thing.

The Older Wilder

He was Billy Wilder's brother, older by one year. His name was Willie Wilder and he made a good living selling women's handbags in New York. An apt example of the American dream (hardworking immigrant version), and wanting to share his new world success, in 1935 he asked his younger brother Billy to come to America. With his movie career at a standstill and the Nazis in power, Billy jumped at the opportunity. Just as plucky and interprising as his brother Willie was in accumulating his fortune, Billy went west to California, roomed with Peter Lorre, learned English from listening to baseball games on the radio, teamed with Charles Brackett, and started writing and then directing some great movies. Soon, Billy's success and wealth surpassed his older brother's. Apparently, this didn't sit well with Willie.

Evidently thinking that if his brother could, he could too, Willie sold his business and moved his family to Hollywood in 1945. He had enough connections (and, no doubt, enough liquid cash) to start producing and directing films. These films were produced in the depths of Poverty Row, with emaciated budgets, skeletal sets, and schedules that hardly lasted a week. When he first started directing, he used the name William Wilder in the credits. He then changed it to W. Lee Wilder, in order not to confuse his film credits with his much more famous (and Oscar winning) brother. He needn't have bothered. The older Wilder's most famous film is probably Killers From Space, which is probably best known for the ludicrous appearance of its aliens. Other highlights from his filmography include Phantom From Space, The Snow Creature, and The Man Without a Body.

Despite living in the same town, and sharing the same profession, the two brothers rarely spoke. Billy saw one of his brother's films, didn't like it, and never saw another one. Billy rarely discussed his brother, but when he did, he was usually dismissive. "He was a fool," he once said. "He lived in America many years before I even came here. I came here, really kind of pushed by Hitler. He was in the leather-goods business—he manufactured handbags. And then one day he said, ‘Well, if my brother can do it, I can do it too.’ He sold his business, he bought a house here, and started making pictures, one worse than the other, and then he died." Billy also referred to his brother as a "dull son of a bitch".

Sibling rivalry? It's quite apparent some odd fraternal dynamic existed between the two Wilders. One can see resentment, embarassment, envy, snobbery and arrogance. There's no doubt more to the story, but the secrets probably died with the principals. For a lot more info, here's an interesting piece by Allen Frost on the films of W. Lee Wilder, and considers what moviemaking lessons he may have learned from his more illustrious brother. Very little, it appears, but was it because the older Wilder was too arrogant to listen, or was Billy too disdainful to even offer advice?

Joe Stalin, Cinema Fiend

Joe Stalin, Cinema Fiend -- Stalin loved movies. He loved Tarzan pictures. He also liked American Westerns, digging on the lone hero archetypes and the harsh and arbritary nature of frontier justice. He also wanted to kill John Wayne. He also told Sergei Eisenstein how to make films. While Eisenstein was making Ivan the Terrible, Stalin offered this insight: "Ivan was very cruel. You can show he was cruel. But you must show why he needed to be cruel." He was also a prude. He hated outward signs of affection in movies, and once, outraged and apparently apoplectic after witnessing one long, slow, soulful kiss on the big screen, he forbade any kissing in any Soviet picture.

Boca do Lixo

Boca do Lixo - it means "Mouth of Garbage" in Portuguese, and it's one of the sleazier and most crime-ridden parts of Sao Paulo (the name is a play on a much swankier and wealthier part of town, Boca do Luxo, "Mouth of Luxury"). It's also the neighborhood where some of Brazil's sleazier cinematic offerings were shot. Consider these films to be the moist and grimier flipside to Brazil's Cinema Novo, a homegrown movement that borrowed from neo-realism and ethnographic films to address the country's political and social ills. Boca do Lixo films instead took their cues from the avant-garde and popular culture. Among the favorites of the Cinema Marginal crowd (as they were known) was Jose Mojica Marins, who starred and directed a series of lurid and primitive horror films in the early '60s as the grimly Nietzchean Ze do Caixao (Coffin Joe).

The signature film of this underground movement was Rogerio Sganzerla's O Bandido da Luz Vermelha (The Red Light Bandit), which seems to be an amalgam of underground and popular tendancies. Its subject matter makes the movie seem like classic gindhouse and drive-in fare: a man breaks into women's houses, illuminates their faces with a red flashlight, talks to them, and then rapes and kills them. Beyond this exploitative aspect, the film also addresses issues of cultural identity, and parodies Brazilian popular culture (this is all based on descriptions of the film -- sadly, this film is not available in the States).

While Sganzerla had aspirations to art and used the "aesthetics of garbage" to make commentaries on the state of Brazil, other films made in the Boca do Lixo had no such pretensions. Taking advantage of the loosening of moral strictures (and in spite of the military dictatorship), these filmmakers started churning out sleazy sex pictures like pornochanchadas, an indigenous form of sex comedy (which borrowed the name chanchada from another uniquely Brazilian cinematic genre, the samba-musical). These movies were cheap and easy to make, and they were big hits at the box office. Some of the higher-end of these vehicles even crossed over to the US like Lady on the Bus and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (the latter of which is not a pornochanchada per se, but an adaptation of a literary novel by Jorge Amado that neverthless carries many of the sexy and ribald trappings of the pornochanchadas). These two films, featuring the talents of the statuesque and often nude Sonia Braga, were often shown on late-night Cinemax in the '80s.

But Boca do Lixo films generally did not make it beyond the Brazilian borders. They were homegrown entertainments from the heady days before globalized cinema (i.e., Hollywood dominated). The graphics used to market these pictures would put your garden variety American pornographer to shame (particularly the one advertising Ou Da... Ou Desce).

You can also listen to some of the music of these kinds of films, via streaming audio (Windows Media) courtesy of Phono 70, an excellent online radio show that specializes in Brazilian rarities.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

An appreciative shout-out to Filmbrain for including Bitter Cinema in his overview of film related blogs. Very happy to be among such distinguished company.

And giving credit where credit is due, thanks to Filmbrain's enthusiastic and thoughtful reviews, I have recently been bitten by the Korean Film bug. Saw a scratchy DVD-R of Park Chan-wook's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance over the weekend. What an exquisitely odd and brilliant film! I was half expecting the fist in your face cinematics that Miike is (in)famous for, but little did I realize that Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance would be such a somber poem on the human costs of vengeance (and I use the term poem advisedly: the film's elliptical structure and visual strokes do not explicate the narrative, nor push it along in a Hollywood fashion, but instead builds layers of emotional and intellectual responses that transcend the narrative --much like a good poem). It plays like a dream, or rather like a nightmare. Imagine yourself in the middle of a darkened highway, totally naked, less one kidney (shoddily removed by a junkie surgeon), deaf and dumb, trying to hitch a ride back home as autos whip by, unconcerned. Our tragic hero Ryu finds himself in such a situation. While the scene can be considered comic, Park's close-ups of Ryu whimpering in the dark has the pathos hitting you like a 2X4. The movie's filled with many scenes like this (another one is when Ryu is holding his girlfriend's hand in the elevator --if you've seen it, you would know how wonderfully touching and tragic it is), and it's the humanity that sets Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance above a lot of know-it-all post-modern slash-and-dash neo-pulp (heads up, Messrs. Miike and Tarantino). It's good to mix a little Truffaut in with your Godard once in a while.

1219 Sample Sources

A list of 1219 sample sources in various recordings, of which almost all are from movies. Number one? That distinction belongs to Blade Runner, which seems obvious enough, considering that film's place and importance within cyber and techno undergrounds. Other popular sources include Star Trek (actually a cheat, as it encompasses all the movies, and the TV shows), Apocalypse Now, Aliens, and, surprisingly, Exorcist III. It's interesting to note how the genres break down. There's science fiction (which are sampled by mainly techno and electronic acts), horror (metal and industrial), and gangster films (hip hop). Even Godard is included, with Alphaville coming in at 263, although it misses Cobra Verde's rip of Alpha 60's voice in their album Viva la Muerte.

Non EC Pre-Code Horror

Speaking of non-EC pre-code horror comics, here's an informative article about just that. Contrary to common knowledge, E.C. did not invent the horror comic, nor were they the first to realize the first successful horror comic series. They were the best, but they weren't the only ones who provided quality chills.

Enter These Weird Worlds

Enter These Weird Worlds -- A nice collection of '50s horror and crime comic book covers. A lot of non-EC titles I've never seen before.

Gojira vs Godzilla

A very interesting comparison between Gojira, the original 1954 Japanese version of Godzilla that is currently in theatrical re-release in the US and its American counterpart (the one with Raymond Burr) by Kathryn Joyce in The Revealer. The contrasts go beyond culture. Indeed, the religious and spiritual implications of both are incredibly different. One deals with repentance and sacrifice, the other believes that might is right. Guess which is which.

Mr. Monster

Some Koreans nicknamed him Mr. Monster, an affectionate tribute to an eccentric moviemaker and to his equally eccentric and dark films. His real name was Kim Ki-young, and his creations could be the most deliriously and deliciously bizarre films you've ever heard of, much less ever seen. A director who worked within the Korean film industry from the 50s until the 80s, Kim eschewed the sentimental and treacly trappings of the popular and traditional Shinpa dramas (which were actually Japanese in origin) and started his career making films that were influenced by the Italian neo-realists. As his career progressed, Kim began to shed the neo-realism, and his movies started to take a decidedly darker and more gothic turn.

One of Kim's signature films is The Housemaid, a lurid melodrama of lust and domestic chaos. Here's a brief synopsis, courtesy of Chuck Stephens:

The husband, a feckless music teacher, gives piano lessons to the young, rural-born women who staff a local factory; his wife, in addition to raising their bratty son and crippled daughter, takes in sewing to supplement the family income. When hubby asks one of his students to recommend a suitable domestic from among the factory girls, the trouble begins. The student, it seems, has developed a powerful crush on the teacher, and when her advances are spurned, she spitefully recommends a chain-smoking farm girl, Myong-ja, to the family's employ. A panic-eyed succubus, Myong-ja makes her first appearance emerging from the student's closet -- as if directly from the rejected woman's vengeful unconscious -- and immediately begins to sow the seeds of the family's destruction.

Nice! The Housemaid and other important Kim films such as The Insect Woman, Woman on Fire, Killer Butterfly, and his last film Carnivore (great titles!) are not available on video through normal means here in the states, although I suppose they may be available in stores that cater to Asian immigrants. Kim has had some recognition in the west with retrospectives in San Francisco and in Berlin in 1998. Unfortunately, 1998 was also the year he died. As Kim and his wife were preparing for a trip to Berlin to personally attend the retrospective, the house the Kims had recently bought and moved into and which was apparently haunted and ill-omened (doubt appealing to Kim's whimsical sense of the macabre) caught fire due to an electrical short circuit. Kim and his wife both died in the blaze.

With the recent ascension of Korean films in the west, culminating with Park Chan-wook's Old Boy winning the Grand Prix at Cannes, perhaps some enterprising company will attempt to release a Region 0 DVD of Kim's work to an unsuspecting Western audience. Hell, maybe even seeing Park's films at the local video store wouldn't be beyond the pale.

For a ton of info on Kim Ki-Young, point your browser to this site run by a Cinema Studies class at the Korean National University of Arts. The site's in English, and it has bios, filmographies, interviews, reviews, and academic papers galore. Simple, but very well done.

Frankenstein Ad Art

A very nice collection of international advertising art, production stills, and pressbooks from Frankenstein films from 1910 to 1950 can be found on the exemplary B-Movie site from Germany (which has plenty of cool stuff to lose yourself in for at least a couple of hours). Even this Frankenstein fan was astounded to see stuff he's never seen before, like this, and this. Great stuff!

via filmtagebuch, a fine German film blog

"Subject for Further Research"

Just to show that Blood Feast can be a "subject for further research", and inspire odd metanarratives, here's Chris Fujiwara's take on a correspondence between Mr. Fuad Ramses, Egyptian Caterer, and a potential client.

Save Blood Feast!

There's an online petition afloat to protest the court ruling in Germany banning the sale of Herschell Gordon Lewis' Blood Feast. The 40 year old gore film was declared by a court in Karlsruhe as Gewaltverherrlichung, "promoting violence". The court's seizure edict (Google Translation) details the scenes that contributed to its subsequent banning. Here's one: (23 min.) The murderer suffocates a woman. After (she) is dead...He tears...out the tongue with bare hands. The pulled out tongue as well as the blood-smeared woman...are in close-up...

The scene sounds a lot worse than it plays on film. I remember reading about Lewis' films way before I ever saw them and expecting them to be the most horrid things I could ever imagine. Sure, I saw some stills, and of course I knew his films scraped the bottom of bottom barrel production values and were shot in the wilds of South Florida, but that knowledge just reinforced in me that these movies (especially Blood Feast and 2000 Maniacs) were the culmination of some Southern culture of blood, an instance of trailer-park sadism and in-bred hillbilly carnage and killing for kicks (I went through my adolescence in Texas, if that explains anything). Then I found an oversized video box of Blood Feast (Wizard Video) at a local mom and pop video emporium. Shrinkwrapped and garish, the box was shelved next to copies of Faces of Death, Dr. Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks, and Zombie Lake. I dared myself to pick it up, and then I dared myself to rent it. Two hours later I slid the tape into the VCR. And just 15 minutes later, as I sat on that beat-up couch, beer in hand, I asked myself, is that all there is about Blood Feast?

Is that all there is? Clearly my fears were not justified. While the movie was not without certain primitive charms and had a kind of 1963 motel room aesthetic (the bright colors, the sets), there was nothing horrible about it but its execution. Sure, there was blood and gore, lots of it, but the violence and mayhem was so profoundly unrealistic and so incompetently shot, that horror was the least and the last of the emotions this movie delivered. Simple disgust, maybe, or a risible kind of disdain. In spite of all that (or, most probably, because of it), through the years Blood Feast has garnered a worldwide following (one can safely call it a "cult", although I feel the term has been bandied about and way overused by film critics and pundits in referring to "off-beat" films in that it has become a genre unto itself; moviemakers are writing and lensing films that they consider "cult" without taking into consideration that it's the appreciative and somewhat obsessive audience that makes the "cult" and not their "wacky" skills --The Dark Backward, anyone?). While some may admire the corny and creaky mechanics of the narrative, the Playboy Playmates ("Introducing Connie Mason... you've read about her in Playboy"), or the phony Egyptology, I'm sure the reason for most of Blood Feast's renown and appreciation is simply a matter of history. In 1963, even if it only played in Southern drive-ins, there was nothing in the world like it. The clinical and pornographic way the film portrayed bloodletting and violence shattered movie paradigms and we haven't been the same since. While 1960's Psycho pushed the envelope of film shock and violence, Blood Feast took the envelope, tore it into shreds, formed the pulp into a ball the size of a large Bartlett Pear, and stuck it up your ass. Which does not make Blood Feast a better movie (it's hardly close, on so many levels), but it certainly is important as a historical and cultural document, a precursor, for better or worse, to a new kind of violent film, splatter cinema if you like. While we may think of splatter as cheap and ugly genre films, it's influenced more films than you think, from Saving Private Ryan to The Passion of the Christ.

Which leads us back to the German ban of Blood Feast, which I find unconscionable and, yes, obscene. To deny Germans the right to view this thin historical slice of American schlock is simply wrong, not unlike the British ban on "video nasties". I genuinely hope that the ruling is overturned, or at least reexamined.

For more on the Blood Feast ban, here's a Mobius thread on the story.

International Indian Film Awards

A major film awards ceremony was held yesterday. No, I'm not talking about Cannes (although I've been heartened to find this year's festival having a higher profile here in the US than previous years --no doubt due to the notoriety surrounding Micheal Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and it's moving and unprecedented reception at the festival, and, of course, Quentin Tarantino's provocative presence as the jury president-- or perhaps I've been reading too many blogs). I'm referring to the International Indian Film Awards, which were presented in Singapore yesterday. The ceremony's big winner was Kal Ho Naa Ho, a love triangle drama shot in New York, which garnered the best film award. One of its stars, Preity Zinta (who also writes a column for the BBC South Asia page) came away with the Best Actress honors.

I readily admit that I have a severe blindspot when it comes to Indian popular film (although I must admit a fascination with what little snippets I've seen of Indian horror movies and their outlandish set pieces shot with shoe-string abandon), but who's to say that Kal Ho Naa Ho couldn't be a moderate hit in the art-house circuit? The movie is about Indian immigrants in New York and the conflict between old world ties and new world demands, which is, of course, one of the great themes in American art. Of course, this time, Americans didn't make it, but Indians. In spite of Kal Ho Naa Ho's soap opera trappings, the film could lend us a different persective on the immigrant experience, amidst all the hoopla and song and dance numbers.

No Such Animal

There's no such animal, despite what the movie poster on the left may indicate, but Abbott and Costello did meet the Creature from the Black Lagoon, if not in a rip-roaring side-splitting laff-fest meant for the big screen, but on NBC's Colgate Comedy Hour in 1954. Here's the low-down on that momentous meeting.

Le Theatre du Grand Guignol

A very interesting and informative site on Le Theatre du Grand Guignol, the desecrated chapel turned intimate shoebox of a theater in Paris that specialized in horrific playlets brimming with gore and sadism. Here's a description of one such play:

The innocent Louise is unjustly locked in an asylum with several insane women. A nurse assigned to protect her blithely leaves for a staff party as soon as Louise falls asleep. The insane women decide that a cuckoo bird is imprisoned in Louise's head and and one gouges out her eye with a knitting needle. The other crazy women are freaked and burn the gouger's face off on a hot plate.

Once a major Parisian tourist attraction, it closed in 1962 when more graphic horror films and the grue of real-life rendered the Grand Guignol's little shows and presentations quaint and campy. However, the idea of presenting theatrical beheadings, disembowelings and the like still continue with troupes like the Thrillpeddlers in San Francisco, who translate and adapt original plays from the Grand Guignol's repetroire, and present original pieces of ghastliness as well.

Zombi

Hailing from Pittsburgh, PA, city of steel mills, Carnegie, and, it goes without saying, George Romero, the musical duo Zombi pay tribute to the prog but eeriely minimal soundtracks of 70s and 80s horror films. The horror connection is obvious, as they named themselves after the Italian title for Romero's Dawn of the Dead (music by Goblin, one of their acknowledged influences), and they've even scored a horror film themselves (Home Sick,which is due out this fall and seems a pretty nasty throwback to 70s style grindhouse stomach churners). The music is sort of a throwback to the throbbing and anxious sounds of Argento, Fulci, Carpenter, and, yes, Romero, and yet it stands on its own as it combines retro synths with avant-metal. The fact that Relapse Records is putting out their next album is a definite plus. Downloadable mp3s available on their site.

LLLS 4 Agent of Doom

The Late-Late-Late Show Project, yet another vain attempt to extrapolate meaning, correlations, and unsure and precarious connections from the trailers of painfully obscure European genre films from the 50s and 60s as collected in Something Weird's Late-Late-Late Show VHS compilation, as referenced here. (1) (2) (3)

No.4 Agent of Doom, original French title Un Soir... par Hasard, which roughly translates as One Evening... by Chance. One Belgian site sketches a very brief synopsis, here translated (via Google): At the time of an accident of motor bike, the young atomic scientist André Ségonne is helped by a motorist. He awakes in an unknown house. A series of unexplainable phenomena soon will transform its life into hell... Science fiction and love story.

Aside from French online merchants like alapage, there's not much to go on concerning this curious film. From what I can gather from the trailer, Florence (played by the ravishing Annette Stroyberg, who also happened to be married to Roger Vadim at the time --and indeed, she is best known nowadays as Vadim's woman between his trysts with Bardot and Deneuve) is either a woman who enjoys eternal youth, or some sort of automaton. She's surrounded by two creepy old men (played by French film stalwarts Jean Servais and Pierre Brasseur), who may be her servants, or former lovers who suffer being her servants merely to be in the glow of her incredible youth and beauty. The young scientist (Michel Le Royer), convalescing in her mansion after a motorcycle accident (a colleague warns him before his excursion: "A motorcycle is a dangerous toy", to which our hero replies, "I'm not about to get killed. I like life too much."), finds himself falling in love with the mysterious Florence. He also finds that he may enjoy eternal youth as well. As arch harpsichord music plays, she tells him: "We'll never grow old, Andre. We'll never be apart." Then we see a jetliner's engine blow and toss young Andre across a runway like an autumn leaf. And the trailer ends.

If this description of the trailer seems remarkably vague, it is because the trailer to Agent of Doom is remarkably vague. Is it a romance, a fantasy story, a spy tale, or some sort of melange of all of them put together? One suspects that the American marketers who put together this trailer were unsure themselves. I imagine their prime directive was to show as much of Annette Stroyberg's bare back as possible.

One interesting sidebar to this film is the story of the man who wrote the novel on which this film is based, L'Aventure Commence ce Soir, or The Adventure Begins This Evening. His name was Robert Collard, but he is best known by his pseudonym R. Lortac, one of France's first animators. Inspired by Winsor McCay's films while on a trip to the United States, he began making animated films in the late teens. Some of these were distributed as 9.5mm films meant for the home market in the early '20s (by Pathé Baby, the first manufacturers of home movie equipment, and who also sold ready to view movies for their system such as Lortac's films, and also Chaplin shorts and different chapters of Abel Gance's Napoleon), and it's in this small format that what's left of Lortac's early work survives. He also started making advertising cartoons in the early '20s, which could be considered the first commercials. In 1922, he began his "Canard en cine" series, which were satirical cartoons shown along with newsreels.

With the coming of the Depression in the 1930s and the advent of World War II, Lortac sold his animation studio and turned to a less taxing way to make a living, writing comic books and popular genre fiction. One of his comic book creations was Bibi Fricotin, a sort of Tintin in space. Another was a series published in Meteor Magazine, Les Conquérants de l'Espace (The Conquerers of Space), featuring the adventures of the space pilot Spade and his smart-talking mechanic Texas. He also started writing novels as Robert Collard, such as Les Bagnards du Ciel (Convicts of the Heavens), and the aforementioned L'Aventure Commence ce Soir. Little did people realize that this genre journeyman was also one of the pioneers of the animated film.

Yet more marginalia. The director of Un Soir... par Hasard, Yvan Govar, has been credited (accused?) by some genre fans as the director of the lost (never completed, or perhaps never even made) Paul Naschy werewolf feature Las Noches del Hombre Lobo (The Nights of the Wolfman). The story surrounding this non-film is fairly interesting, but best left for another time.

Glenn Branca

Streaming video hits you in the solar plexus! Here's a collection of performance videos from Glenn Branca and his electric guitar ensembles. Atonal and cool, and still going at it apparently.

Here's Inga!!

Mp3 Friday! Back with a vengeance! This week we present the rocking Middle of Nowhere by The Good Grief, the title tune of the 1968 Swedish skin flick Inga. (Clay Pitts and Robert Sterling) 1.8M

"The most acclaimed masterpiece of erotic cinema ever created!" claims the blurb on the cover of the "Collector's Edition" DVD of Joe Sarno's Inga, or, as it was known in Sweden, where it was produced, Jag - en oskuld (I, a Virgin). Surely another case of an adman's hyperbole, as the film, a taciturn soap opera with some nudity, clearly does not live up to its billing (what film could, really?). The blurb itself seems quaint, from a time (not that long ago) when the promise of art could be used to push sex, at least making it high-minded enough to make the sex seem respectable. Pick up a copy of any Playboy from the 60s, and in between the gatefold and "The Girls of Rio" pictorial, you would find Nabokov, Bertrand Russell, and Marshall McLuhan. Sex became the thinking man's sport. In the arts, loosening the bounds of decency statutes became the province of poets and prurient hucksters alike.

The sex films of the period exemplified this odd dichotomy. Filmmakers like Sarno and Radley Metzger had pretensions to art, but still had enough T&A to appeal to the raincoat crowd. Inga is not an exception. With its crisp b&w photography, Swedish locations, and Scandinavian quietude, some have made the comparison to Bergman. This is a stretch. While a lot of it is artfully done, it shows nothing that compares to Bergman's moral weight. It's essentially a story of a woman who attempts to pimp out her teenage niece to a wealthy publisher "who likes young girls" in order to have the money to keep her much younger boyfriend. The niece ends up sleeping with the boyfriend, and the aunt finds herself with nothing in the end. Not necessarily a bad story, but it would have been better without the arthouse pretensions. Better as a Sirk, not a Bergman.

The main title for Inga is the song "Middle of Nowhere", written by Clay Pitts and Robert Sterling, and performed by The Good Grief. A very fuzzy guitar lead snakes around a classic mid-60s "shake" beat. The lyrics (in English) offer a critique of the nihilism and angst of youth: "Everybody's playing, but nobody's really winning...It's a paradox, they don't know if it's joy or pain...Believing that their friends are in hell (spooky sound from the organ)...And where does it take you to, if you refuse to care...The middle of nowhere!" I'm assuming The Good Grief are Swedish. The heavy fuzz gives it away, along with the singer's accent. I found nothing about the band on the web. The imdb has The Bamboos listed (they're listed as The Good Grief in the credits). While I couldn't find anything about The Bamboos, there is a Swedish band called Bamboo, whose claim to fame is that it launched singer Mikael Rickfors' career, first as a member of the 70s version of The Hollies, then as a solo artist. So, are The Good Grief The Bamboos in disguise? Does anyone care? One of the song's writers is Clay Pitts. The only other credit I could find for him is the soundtrack for another sex film (from 1970) Female Animal. There's an interesting discussion about the Inga soundtrack on the Mobius Euro Cult Board (scroll down to Scoring with INGA), alas with no resolution.

Your Littlest Gauge

Long before the advent of DVD, and way before the days of VHS and Beta, the very idea of collecting feature films for home viewing was impractical, cumbersome and horribly expensive. Sure, some worthy and enterprising souls collected 35mm and 16mm prints of their favorite movies, but normally these collectors were theater owners or had access to the hardware needed to project these reels. For those of lesser means who still wished to keep at least a small taste of a memorable film experience, alternatives might include recording an audio cassette off the late, late show, commercials carefully edited out (as I had done, many years ago, when local TV used to broadcast movies instead of infomercials in the wee hours), or, for the more adventurous, film favorite scenes directly off the television with a Super 8 camera (which I also tried, although with not much success). Or you can do what most reasonable people did: buy edited highlights of their favorite feature in a 100 to 400 ft Super 8 reel. These would usually run from 7 to 25 minutes, and would sort of synopsize the movie's story in that allotted time. Some were sound, but most were silent. Sketchy intertitles would not only function to show dialogue, but also to completely do away with exposition and provide the merest wisp of context with the previous scene. Thus, the 30 minutes of plot, gags and happenings between two scenes in, say, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein can be reduced to a simple title: "After escaping Dracula, the boys find themselves in Frankenstein's lair".

These were highlight reels of your favorite movies, pure and simple. Cinema ESPN, if you like. An interesting question to pose, though: who were the editors of these expurgated editions? They were usually the employees of companies such as Castle Films (here's a nice history of Castle Films here), who bought a movie's rights from a studio, chopped them down to size, and then printed them in 8mm or Super 8 reels, often packaged in garishly designed boxes (here's a nice collection of images of these boxes). But these editors, how did they work? Did they study the full feature backwards and forwards in order to find the perfect abridgment? Or did they put in the exciting stuff, with no care at all to any semblance of narrative order? Did they follow a certain aesthetic?

Possibly the closest analogue to these truncated films are trailers, if only in the way a film can be distilled into an impossibly short length. Other than that, these little editions are quite unique, and, aside of a few collectors, pretty much forgotten. If one were so inclined, one could do an interesting study.

Yet Another Post about KB

Yet another post about Kill Bill --Screencaps from the Japanese Region 2 disc. See the showdown at The House of Blue Leaves in all its colorful and gory glory.

New KB Edit?

Rumors are afloat that Tarantino intends to re-edit and fuse together both volumes of his Kill Bill opus for a year-end release for video and quite possibly for a limited release in theaters. Speculation on the DVD Times Forum is that a total re-edit of the structure is in the works and that one shouldn't expect a simple and expedient tacking on of the second volume to the end of the first.

I see troubles for film scholars ahead, not to mention for the well-being of film fans and collectors. I suppose this sort of reordering and refashioning of an ostensibly completed work began in earnest back in 1977 when Francis Ford Coppola re-edited parts I and II of The Godfather into a sprawling miniseries for NBC. What was notable for that endeavor, entitled The Godfather Saga, or The Godfather 1902-1959: The Complete Epic was not just the inclusion of outtakes of both movies but the chronological reordering of the events of Part II. While this may make some sort of narrative sense and assuage some of the confusion and insecurity some viewers may have felt trying to piece things together, it also undermined the complex thematic poignancy of the juxtaposition of the scenes of Little Italy and those in mid-century Tahoe. It was this juxtaposition that made The Godfather Part II a greater film, I feel, than its predecessor. Aesthetic considerations won out in the end, though, and both films (along with its sickly Fredo-like Part III) are available in a handsome boxed set, along with the outtakes that were included in the TV Saga. Of course, the remanufacturing of our filmic past didn't stop there. Again, Coppola put out Apocalypse Now Redux, which added about an hour's worth of material to his original (I still prefer the original). Thanks to the introduction of the DVD format, there are more director's cuts than you can shake a stick at, which begs the question: which will be the proper and accepted text for future scholarship and archiving, and who will decide this. Will Peter Jackson's take on The Return of the King be studied as it theatrical version or some mega five hour version available on some 3 disc special edition? Did Han Solo shoot first, or did Greedo?

Then again, it's Hollywood isn't it? It's a matter of merchandising, not artistic credibility. If Tarantino edits both volumes of Kill Bill into one big sloppy and lovable mess, will both original volumes still be available? Probably, because it will be something for the fanboys to buy in order to keep their collections complete. Which will be the versions dissected and analyzed in the future, say a hundred years from now? If one assumes there will be an academic pursuit such as Tarantino Studies in the year 2104 (which may sound absurd to some, but people study 19th century Penny Dreadfuls), then one can imagine future scholars sifting through the variety of versions available, editing compendia, comparing exegeses not unlike dusty monks studying the apocrypha in the middle ages.

KB Game

Bored? Here's a time waster, courtesy of Kill Bill's official Czech site. You can be Uma for a day, or at least for a couple of minutes, and slice and dice and de-limb an enslaught of the Crazy 88 as Al Hirt's Green Hornet plays in the background. Mindlessly fun. via Boing Boing

I Saw Kill Bill Vol. 2

I saw Kill Bill Vol. 2 yesterday, and, while I enjoyed it, I felt the movie was neither "the personal reverie that generates a dramatic power of its own" as Variety's Todd McCarthy rhapsodized (the first review a lot of us read on the film, but now only accessible to Variety subscribers, so I apologize for the sketchy link), nor the "shapeless mess" as opined by The New Yorker's David Denby, or evidence of our incipient "cultural retardation" as pointed out by the pugnacious Armond White of The New York Press.

This is Tarantino: the man clearly loves cinema. He lives it and breathes it. This is a good thing. This cannot be more evident than running through the trailers leading up to Kill Bill, where one can practically smell the stink of cynical merchandising and Hollywood manipulation behind the bullshit of Van Helsing and I, Robot. Tarantino makes movies because he loves movies. Unfortunately, I fear that may be the only thing he loves (apart from the pop ephemera of growing up in the 70s). The man is 40 years old. He should be hitting his artistic and intellectual stride. Instead I find in his films, as fun and as visceral as they are, the work of a very smart, very talented, very precocious 16 year old. Which is not to say they are strictly immature, but there is a shallowness of emotion and experience that comes from a life ensconced in dark sticky theaters and in front of TV sets with smouldering bong in hand. I'm perhaps being harsh, but that's only because I think Tarantino has it in him to be a truly great filmmaker. Playing "spot the reference" is great fun for movie lovers, but its nothing more than a parlor game. It may sound trite, and it's been said a thousand times, but it's the universality of the human condition and experience that makes art truly great and transcend whatever perimeters we may place on it. Sometimes movies need to be more than to be about movies.

Shiseido TV Commercials

An interesting collection of Japanese television advertising from 1960 to the present from Shiseido, a cosmetics company that has been around since 1872. I especially like the b&w 1960 doowop guys with the checkered jackets and portable grooming kits.

Mexi-Horror!!

A good survey of Mexican horror and fantasy cinema from 1933 to 1970. Mexico was establishing it's own horror tradition in the 30s, the same time Universal was doing the same in the states. In Spanish. Here's a translation from Google.

Soledad Miranda Sings!

Cult horror queen Soledad Miranda, while toiling away in westerns and costume dramas in the Spanish film industry in the mid-sixties, also tried her hand as a pop singer. It's pretty pedestrian, really, but you can find cover scans of her records and mp3 samples here.

Italo-Horror Frame Grabs

Very nice frame grab comparison between the recently released DVD of Mill of the Stone Women and several Mario Bava 60s gothics, showing many stylistic similarities. Compliled by Henrik Hemlin, who also helps run the Mario Bava Web Page. From the Mobius Home Video Forum.

Fu Manchu For Mayor

Ah, the days when Occidentals played Asians....Not so long ago actually. Peter Sellers played Fu Manchu in 1980 (The Fiendish Plot of Fu Manchu, his last film, I think, not including the outtakes that were flung into that lame Pink Panther thing released 2 years after his death), and Spanish horror star Paul Naschy played Fu Manchu in 1990 (La Hija de Fu-Manchu). These are just two tidbits of arcane info found at The Movies of Fu Manchu, a repository of graphics, posters, promo pieces and other neat stuff. Part of a larger Fu Manchu site.

The Bloody Pit of Swank!!

Mp3 Tuesday!-- some minor internet problems and other distractions precluded me from uploading this on Friday. I hope it's just as enjoyable -- the swanky, swinging, and sadean Theme from The Bloody Pit of Horror (Il Boia Scarlatto) (Gino Peguri) 3.6M

At a certain moment of excess, I conjectured that if Michelangelo Antonioni was a third-rate hack who toiled in relative anonymity in the papier-mache depths of Cinecitta, where Monica Vitti wouldn't even give him the time of day as she rushed by him on her way to the set of her comedy with Alberto Sordi, he could have possibly made Il Boia Scarlatto, aka The Bloody Pit of Horror. The notion, on the face of it, is of course quite absurd, ridiculous even. But through sleepy late-night slits for eyes, though the imagination may be cloudier, I thought I saw the stamp of Antonioni.

Syrupy and sinister languor marks each minute like a stain. Like Antonioni's upper-class creations, the artists and models of Il Boia Scarlatto who meander through the long hallways and corridors of Travis Anderson's (Mickey Hargitay) odd castle find little joy or emotion in their lives. Ennui rules their day. So does cynicism. Even the act of love provides little solace or even anything resembling human interaction (indeed a woman's empty stare as her lover busses her neck mirrors the expressions of Monica Vitti and Jeanne Moreau in similar situations in Antonioni's early 60s films).

Ironically, it is only when confronted with physical torture and horrible deaths do our characters exhibit any pathos. Indeed, it often plumbs the depths of utter despair: "Why is this happening?" a woman cries out as boiling oil is poured over her bare back. "I can't stand this anymore!" "Please don't! I don't want to die like this!" the impresario screams as he's roasted alive. "Mercy!"

Then again, the existential distress our characters exhibit may not be intentional on the filmmakers' part (in this case director Massimo Pupillo, and writers Romano Migliorini and Roberto Natale), but merely the byproduct of a weak and silly script and even weaker and sillier actors. The film has garnered a certain reputation as a "cult classic" (a term I tend to dislike, but I'll use anyway), if only because of Mickey Hargitay's maniacal performance. It's also interesting that it refers to Hargitay's own history as a "muscleman in costume films" in the character he plays. In fact, one can see Il Boia Scarlatto as an outgrowth of the peplum genre, or Italian sword and sandal films, or an attempt to hybrid this genre (on its last legs in the mid-60s) with the gothic horror that was popular in Italy at the time. In any case, most people call it camp nowadays, but there's also a fringe following that focuses on the cheesecake and torture chamber aspect, which seems harmless on the surface, but gets pretty ugly when you dig a little deeper.

The music was by Gino Peguri, who has about 16 films to his credit, usually westerns in the 60s and softcore porn in the 70s. His first soundtrack was for a mondo documentary called Italia Proibita in 1963. Il Boia Scarlatto was his second score for a film, and one can hear the mondo influence. Scenes of depravity are set against soft swingy lounge tunes. Peguri's only bow to horror music convention is the skeletal sound of a discordant guitar, which sort of sounds like early 80s NYC downtown no wave. After the main credits, we hear some sweet cocktail music as our characters make their way to the castle where most of them will meet their horrible fates. Nothing like a sense of foreboding.

Psycho Flash Edit Thing

More Psycho stuff. Neat little Flash page where you can re-edit the shower scene yourself. I attempted a minimalist version with just shots of Janet Leigh's gaping mouth. I can delude myself by thinking that it works. It's in the gallery section listed as "minimalist psycho".

Was Gus Psycho?

I always thought Gus Van Sant's Psycho was one grossly misunderstood movie. I always thought it quite audacious to attempt a shot by shot remake of one of the most studied films in the history of the art, a film that had been analyzed shot by shot obsessively, compulsively, fetishistically. The frothing reaction by movie-buffs to the news of its production and its eventual release was something approaching pitchforks and torches. It was as if Van Sant had shat on the Master's grave. The common complaint among critics was "Why?" Another one was "Pointless." Of course, the point these critics missed was not that Van Sant intended his version to be a replacement or a a version upgrade (in software parlance) to the venerable original (despite Van Sant's claims to the press about updating it in color to cater to younger filmgoers' tastes, which in retrospect seems nothing more than playing to the reporters, which of course Hitchcock used to do). Instead, I feel, it was Van Sant's intent to create a companion piece to the original, a variation to a theme, formally something a little more complex than mere homage. Things like this are common in other artforms like music, painting, sculpture, even poetry. Despite claims of cinema's closest analogues being music, dance, or even the plastic arts, what a lot of people expect and want out of movies hasn't changed since the days of Griffith, that is, essentially, the aesthetic trappings of the Victorian novel: a well paced plot arc, three dimensional characters, a climax and denouement. People feel cheated if they don't get them.

Mark Carpenter suggests in an interesting piece in Off Screen that Van Sant is engaging in "appropriation art", art that utilizes and exploits elements of the original, and comments on it the same time. Carpenter comments Van Sant "...provides us is a near-mirror image which leaves us with the peculiar sensation of watching ourselves watching images retained from our viewing past".

Indeed. Van Sant's Psycho is best appreciated by those who love and know the original like the back of their hand, like I do, and so many other people. These are the people who, in their pale and awkward adolescence, recorded the soundtrack off the late-late show on C-90 cassette and who played it back, flipping through Richard Anobile's shot by shot book (which may have inspired young Gus, too). People who had it on Beta, then VHS. Surely, these fans would understand Van Sant's motive, his meta-commentary on Psycho, and also the movie industry itself (it's a wonder it got financed at all; it's like Hollywood's first art school film). Maybe they would dig on the familiarity, and then the not so familiar. Then these could be acolytes who would rage and rail against the heresy of the thing.

LLLS 3 To Catch a Spy

The Late-Late-Late Show Project, the third in a breath-taking series of attempts to dig through European genre cinema one trailer at a time in the order of their appearance on Something Weird's The Late-Late-Late Show tape, as referenced here. (1) (2)

No.3 To Catch a Spy, original French title Action Immediate, which translates as, well, Immediate Action. One can consider this movie as a proto-Bond film, at least in the sense of having a debonair, womanizing secret agent as a hero, kooky gadgets like secret telephones hidden in tree trunks, car chases and some heavy duty violence (a woman gets punched pretty damn hard --in fact it looks pretty damn real). It's very much like a Bond film, except To Catch a Spy actually seems to have intrigue and cloak and dagger stuff, which normally shows up in spy stories, but which the Bond series hasn't touched since 1963. Then again, Ian Fleming wasn't Eric Ambler.

Action Immediate was produced in 1957, which predated James Bond's first film appearance by 5 years. Interestingly, the spy novel series on which this movie was based, the Coplan FX-18 series by Paul Kenny (a pseudonym of the writing team of Jean Libert and Gaston Van den Panhuyse, who also wrote science-fiction novels under the name of Jean-Gaston Vandel introduced the sly Francis Coplan, agent FX-18 of the French secret services, in 1953 with the novel Sans Issue, one year after Ian Fleming introduced James Bond 007 in Casino Royale. Casino Royale caused a minor sensation in Britain, but did very little elsewhere. It's doubtful the first Bond novel made any impression on the two collaborators except as a footnote as to what was popular in England at the time. Maybe that was enough. Or maybe it was one of those pop cultural synchronicities that happen more than you think. In any case, the series proved popular enough to spawn 100s of novels, comic books, TV shows and movies. The series outlived its authors (who gave up their well-received SF novels to devote full time to Coplan). The series was finally discontinued in 1996.

Action Immediate was the first of the Coplan film adaptations, based on a 1955 novel. The trailer seems to exhibit a certain breezy insouciance. Its hero, the agent Coplan played by Henri Vidal, is the nonchalant man of action, who laughs, smokes, drinks, seduces his way through danger. But as the announcer intones: "It isn't a pretty story. Everyone involved is in danger at every moment. No one can be trusted. No one knows who is an enemy or who can become one. And speed is vital. Lives may be cheap, but minutes can be priceless...To Catch a Spy, before it's too late!" The intrigue is thick and suffocating --something we don't see in spy thrillers post-Bond. We witness a lot of the trappings of pre-technological spy fiction: the mysterious men in fezzes, briefcases changing hands, magnifying glasses, sultry and duplicitous women. It feels old-fashioned, quaint even.

It's interesting to speculate how Action Immediate could have been a model for a Bond style spy thriller if they were made in the 50s instead of the 60s. Henri Vidal plays a sturdy, charming enough hero, but exhibits none of the decadence and amorality Connery projected in his portrayal of government agent as satyr. It's also interesting that another Coplan film was not produced until 1964 (Coplan, Agent Secret FX 18), just when international Bondmania was just taking off. Then a spate of Coplan films followed, all of them looking like the Bond knock-offs European studios churned out without discretion throughout the 1960s. But Action Immediate was the first. It's difficult to say whether Action Immediate was a one shot, or the presumed first in a series. Maybe the box office wasn't so hot and the idea for a series was shelved. Maybe the premature death of leading man Henri Vidal in 1959 put a nix on the idea. In any case, it gives us a glimpse into an alternate history of genre cinema: the spy thriller without the hegemonic weight of the Bond series.

Cine-Fotoromanzi

The Italians call them cine-fotoromanzi, a comic book which adapts a movie by using stills and frames from the movie. Here's an example, from the late 1960s Italian magazine CINESEX: an adaptation of L'Assoluto Naturale (1969), or She and He, starring Laurence Harvey and Sylva Koscina. Apparently it has a cool soundtrack by Ennio Morricone. From a Japanese Sylva Koscina tribute site, which is pretty cool if you dig 1960s era Euro-babes.

Futura Extra Bold

Futura Extra Bold --"...It was Stanley's favourite typeface. It's sans serif. He liked Helvetica and Univers, too. Clean and elegant." One interesting nugget of infomation among many brought to clear light of day as Jon Ronson receives the opportunity of a lifetime --to dig through the boxes upon boxes of the Stanley Kubrick archive. From the Guardian.

Nazi Comics

Nazi comic strips poke fun at Americans and their movies. They also bitch about Superman. Just a couple of the exhibits from the Nazi and East German Propaganda Archive.

One more: check out the Nazi board game --Stukas Attack!

Johnny Cash's Thunderball

Mp3 Friday!-- forgot to put one up last week, so this time we'll have one that especially nice-- Thunderball (Johnny Cash) 3.3M

No, it's not Cash's take on Tom Jones' brassy tune, but an alternate theme for the 1965 James Bond epic. I don't know the particulars on whether it was a commissioned piece, or if it was entirely Cash's idea, but it was submitted to Eon Productions Ltd. for consideration as the theme for their biggest, boldest Bond yet.

The mind reels at the possibility, but the Cash version (which Johnny Cash wrote himself) is not a bad little number, but it's Ghost Riders of the Sky shuffle and Cash's very earnest baritone, of course, do not fit the Bond model, which in 1965 was the apotheosis of pop style. Cash's theme seems of an earlier time, where recounting a hero's deeds against evildoers in a ballad, up against the self-referential, mocking tone of the Bond films, feels as old-fashioned as a horse and buggy. This is not to say that the songs Cash wrote and sang were unsophisticated. Indeed, many of Cash's best work was darker and much more complicated, at least from a moral perspective, than anything from the Bond series. Bond, I feel, set a new paradigm for film heroes in the 1960s, one which set the decent fellow model on its ear. This new hero's amoral pursuit of pleasure, be it for sexual conquest or for the thrill of adventure, may, on the surface, make these heroes seem more complicated, but that may not always be the case. One can imagine Bond shooting a man just to watch him die, but never lamenting the circumstances, nor be tortured by the consequences like the characters in Cash's songs.

Kubrick's Polaroids.

Remarkable Polaroid lighting tests shot during the production of 2001: A Space Odyssey are the gems found at this German website (with German and English language versions) for a Stanley Kubrick exhibit for the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt.

Gallo's Bunny's Brown

Glad to know there are others interested in Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny, and not just because of Ms. Sevigny's oral commitment. Like Anna Karina's Sweater has tons of info.

 

There's Always Toomorrow

Before Xanadu, even before Grease, there was Toomorrow which features 21 year-old Olivia Newton-John and three guys as the "rock group" Toomorrow and their sci-fi adventures. Produced in 1970 by Don Kirshner, creator of the Monkees, and Harry Saltzman, who made his bones with the Bond movies, it opened with a fair amount of fanfare, but then closed after a week when the principals realized they had a dog on their hands. It was immediately shelved, and it's been screened very seldom since. Rumors state that Kirschner won't have the film re-released during his lifetime. Meanwhile, a bootleg floats around in Japan. You can hear sound clips from the Toomorrow album here.

Even before Toomorrow, there was Funny Things Happen Down Under, which was Olivia's first feature back in 1965, when she was all of 17.

 

KMPX and KSAN Airchecks

The counter-culture took to the airwaves in San Francisco with such "underground" radio stations like KMPX and KSAN, which provided the template for the cool laid-back stylings of FM rock radio throughout the 70s and the 80s before Clear Channel engulfed them all and any hint of personality was erased. Excepting in the case of left of the dial and college stations, to suggest that the playlists of these late 60s stations are more eclectic than those of present day radio would be so obvious as to be absurd. Find dozens of audio samples and airchecks herein, scoped and unscoped. And don't forget the flowers in your hair.

 

The Snotgreen Sea

It's St. Patrick's Day, and along with the wearing of the green and the prodigious consumption of alcohol, and, as sure as the nose on your face, John Ford's The Quiet Man will be playing at a TV set near you. Sodden with boozy Irish sentimentality, the sign of the cross and the fisticuffs, the fiery-haired Colleens, the rolling green fields, and Barry Fitzgerald mouthing Celtic dicta, you're sure not to find more bog fodder than this piece of fine Irish-American treacle. Where one can find the inherent contradictions of the Hibernarian soul -- its brutality and its sentimentality, its conservatism and its joy in poetry-- as inpenetrable as your fifth pint of Guinness, The Quiet Man feels as authentically Irish as green Budweiser.

 

Martin Amis and Saturn 3

Little did I realize that the schlocky 1980 science fiction epic Saturn 3 was scripted by none other than that mad dog Englishman Martin Amis. I wish I could somehow tie it all up, and find in Saturn 3 the germ of an exegesis to Amis' body of work, but it's been about 8 years since I've read any of Amis' books (the fantastic Time's Arrow, which probably could make a pretty good movie), and more than 20 since I've last seen Saturn 3 (which I remember as being laughably bad, but nothing more than that). What Amis got out of the endeavor was, of course, a Hollywood paycheck, but also the background for his novel Money, where the movie's actors Kirk Douglas, Farrah Fawcett, and Harvey Keitel were reimagined in the novel as Lorne Guyland, Butch Beausoleil, and Spunk Davis. As Amis later said: "It just seemed to me that when I was working on that film I was head-doctoring and kissing ass, and writing these characters as they saw themselves, as they idealised themselves."

Art imitates life, or in this case imitates trash. I haven't read Money, but it may mark my return to the Amis ouevre, perhaps in tandem with a re-viewing of Saturn 3. In any case, we can admire this Polish poster of Saturn 3, which gives it more of a pop-art Barbarella feel than I remember the movie having. The film's director, Stanley Donen has an impressive pedigree as a director of musicals for MGM in the 50s and sophisticated entertainments like Charade and Two for the Road. Donen received an honorary Oscar in 1998, more than likely not for his efforts on Saturn 3.

 

Hip 1960s & 1970s German TV advertising on display here. Commercials spanning from 1956 to 2002 for the German soft-drink Afri-Cola. As is usually the case, the ads from the 60s and 70s are the most creative. The cola was advertised as the "safe drug" during the tumultous year of 1968. It's still being bottled to this very day, and it has its adherents.

 

Hey Navajo Joe

Mp3 Friday! ....this week: Main Title-Navajo Joe (Ennio Morricone) 3.9M

This is a great track! Also a classic mid-1960s western theme from Morricone: the screeching wordless vocals, the thick twang of the Danelectro guitar, a battery of tympanis, and a frenetic Italian choir chanting "Navajo Joe! Navajo Joe!" This was composed about the same time as The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, and there are many similarities. And while that classic tune is a pop masterpiece (and then some), the Navajo Joe Theme has almost an abrasive avant edge (but then again, so does a lot of late 1960s Italian film music).

As a film, Navajo Joe is hardly The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (not even close), but it has its defenders. The movie's star, Burt Reynolds, thought it the worst film of his career. Then again, before the stellar reviews came pouring in, he thought Boogie Nights was a piece of shit, too.

 

LLLS 2 Danger in the Middle East

The Late-Late-Late Show Project, which is a vain attempt to track down as much information on the very obscure European programmers whose shoddily produced trailers are featured in Something Weird's The Late-Late-Late Show tape, and extrapolate like mad when the information withers, dries up, and blows away carelessly.

No. 2: Danger in the Middle East, original French title Le Bal des Espions, which translates as The Ball of Spies, or maybe, The Dance of Spies. It's Italian title is Le Schiave Bianche, which translates as White Slave Girls, a decidedly more prurient title. It has more of a pedigree than our last Late Show entry, The Fury of the Apaches. Indeed, as the narrator of the trailer proclaims at the beginning: "A newcomer among great motion picture directors, Michel Clément, has created for you the most unusual and most exciting of the new French films!", which could signal it as part of the French New Wave. Whether or not Clément was associated with the New Wave, Clément did pay his dues, working as an assistant for New Wavers' favorite Robert Bresson on Pickpocket and A Man Escaped, but there seems to be very little of Bresson's cinematic austerity in Clément's film as exhibited in the trailer. There's plenty of action, sex, and some very brutal violence (a man is pinned against a wall by a very fast moving car, a man's neck is broken barehandedly, pistol whippings aplenty, and a lot of people shot in the back). Seemingly, none of Bresson's transcendental style is evident. Also the movie has Michel Piccoli, who starred in films by Godard and Buñuel, and the stunning Françoise Arnoul, who's worked with Renoir and Rosellini.

Once again I must submit a disclaimer that I haven't seen the full movie in question, just it's trailer, but it's safe to say that Danger in the Middle East may be little more than an average actioner. This was Clément's only directorial effort. He want back to assistant work soon after

I don't believe this movie is available anywhere in any format.

 

Obligatory Dio Post

If for no other reason than to show how time has not dulled the creepiness of its nerdy stalker premise, here's Dio's Rainbow in the Dark , a video from the glory days of mid-80s MTV. Count the cliches, if you can. Darkness fans, take note.

 

Ah Sweet Vespa!

Here's an interesting gallery of Vespa calendar images from the 50s and 60s, as fine a collection as any of European cheesecake. Included are beauties like Angie Dickinson, Jayne Mansfield, horror queen Barbara Steele, Bond girls Ursula Andress and Claudine Auger, and... John Wayne?

Going Ape Over Godzilla

The Japanese call them kaijû eiga, we call them, for lack of a better definition, Japanese monster movies, the ones where outsized creatures do battle, and stomp underfoot the toylike trappings of humanity. At one time scorned and belittled, and considered merely the province of children and developmentally arrested males, now they are considered worthy of academic study. Here is one example: an exhibit of Japanese monster movie posters from around the world at the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University.

For more Japanese poster art, check out this collection of images from Toho studios, the people responsible for most of the giant creatures we saw hopping across matinee screens.

 

Garota de Ipanema

Mp3 Friday! A new Bitter Cinema feature.... This week: Tema de Desilusao from Garota de Ipanema (com. Antonio Carlos Jobim arr. Eumir Deodato

I hate to be using another IMDB link for a movie, but if that's all you can find.... Garota de Ipanema, or The Girl from Ipanema, was made in 1967, a sort of tie-in to the famous Bossa Nova tune by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes. I can find very little information about the film except for what you can find through the IMDB. Maybe it wasn't very good, but the soundtrack's not bad at all. The soundtrack's line-up seems like an all-star cast of Brazilian musical talent in the mid-60s: Tom Jobim, Vinicius, Chico Buarque, Elis Regina, Baden Powell, Tamba Trio, Quarteto em Cy, Nara Leao. The soundtrack's been hard to find until it was recently reissued, I think in Brazil. Now I think it's out of print again.

But here's a little taste. This tune is entitled Tema de Desilusao, which means, I think, Theme of Disillusion, which is the last track of the record. The melody should be very familiar, as it's The Girl from Ipanema, but darkly colored with minor chord progressions and a somber orchestration. The melody is, of course, Jobim's, but the arrangement was by Eumir Deodato, who later scored a hit in the U.S. with his jazz-fusion take on Also Sprach Zarathustra, which we all know as the 2001 Theme. I'm assuming that the disillusion occurs when the girl from Ipanema walks away, impervious to the main character's attention. Or maybe someone gets killed in a boating accident, and life is seen as a strange folly. Disillusionment comes in many shades of gray.

As an aside, Helo Pinheiro, the actual inspiration for the original song, and has used her modicum of notoriety to some advantage, appeared recently with her daughter in a pictorial in the Brazilian edition of Playboy. Olha que coisa mais linda!

 

LLLS 1 The Fury of the Apaches

The Late-Late-Late Show Project (as referenced here)

No. 1: Fury of the Apaches, original Spanish title El Hombre de la Diligencia, which could translate as The Man of Diligence, or The Diligent Man (as in a thorough and careful fellow), but more than likely means The Man from the Stagecoach, or Stagecoach Man, as there's a stagecoach in this movie trailer, the first in Something Weird's The Late-Late-Late Show video comp, but there's very few diligent men, unless they're diligent about killing Apaches.

Fury of the Apaches was a Spanish-Italian co-production from 1964, which incidentally was the same year Leone and Eastwood broke new ground with A Fistful of Dollars. No two European westerns could seem further apart, either stylistically or philosophically. This is not an indictment on The Fury of the Apaches, but it shows the aesthetic broad-jump A Fistful of Dollars made within the genre.

Of course, this reading is made solely on viewing the trailer, not the actual feature film, so whatever critical judgments I make are clearly suspect. The Fury of the Apaches could be a magnificent film. It could be playing with the tropes and conventions of the genre. It could be the work of an inspired hand. It's director, Jose Maria Elorrieta, began his film career making short documentaries on Spanish painters and architectural treasures, so he may understand pictorial style. He also wrote many of the films he directed. However, glancing through his filmography one sees the straight and narrow road of a journeyman, a man who kept his fingers in many pies, generically speaking, from an early 60s sentimental convent drama starring Soledad Miranda, a wacky and sexy 1967 fantasy-comedy with Jeffrey Hunter, and an early 70s vampire film, and westerns like Fury of the Apaches. It could be that the inhuman butchers who edited the trailer and wrote the accompanying copy, drained the subtle beauty from the original, purged its moral ambiguity, removed the ahead-of its-time sensitive portrayal of Native Americans, and in its stead had a manly stentorian voice read over gunshots, whistling bullets, galloping horses, shrieking Apache war cries:

An epic episode in this epic story of the West. As our pioneers face the fury and terror of a savage land and a still more savage people. The paleface frantically search for gold but often found... The Fury of the Apaches!

Instead, we have a carnival of cliche. Here's one exchange. Our hero, Major Loman, portrayed by American Frank Latimore, fights another fellow and then holds him at bay with a loaded Winchester. In between them stands Ruth, played by our female lead, the lovely Filipina Liza Moreno (whose own filmography includes a turn as Darna, the Philippines' biggest comic book heroine). She speaks:

"Don't shoot Loman. Don't. For my sake." (Rather unspiritedly)

In walks another fellow, who surveys the situation bemusedly. He speaks:

"You two have found a good time to kill each other! You two! Why don't you wait 'til we got rid of the Apaches!" (In a campy Paul Lynde kind of voice)

You get the gist. Remember those scenes in old movies when someone would turn on a TV set, a cowboy and Indian movie would come on? The generic late movie (at least from the fifties and sixties), the western everybody's seen for a million times? Imagine your grandad, flipping through the TV Guide after dinner on the easy chair in 1967, finding Fury of the Apaches is coming on at 8 on channel 9, lighting his first Pall Mall of the evening, gets off the chair with a grunt, clicks the dial to 9, adjusts the "goddamn" rabbit ears, settles down with a cold can of Ballantine Ale, farts. Within 30 minutes, in between ads for Tareyton cigarettes and Lou's Used Car Emporium, grandpa's out like a light. Later, grandma nudges him awake and she leads him to bed. Does he tell his buddies at the plant about the wonderful find he saw the night before?

Hell no. He leaves it for his smartass grandkids, college educated but barely making a living, to spend way too much effort on some paella-spaghetti western he may have given the time of day (and only that). Then again, he may have known it as Apache Fury, which was its original American title. Or perhaps he knew it as Ranch of the Doomed? Who would give a shit about some cowboy picture?

Indeed. I was ready to quickly dismiss Fury of the Apaches as a reactionary western, perhaps even Francoist one, at least in the trailer's depiction of the Apaches. Even John Ford was enlightened about the Indians in 1964. Then I found a blurb on the film (yes, you can have it on VHS):

Geronimo's Apaches attack a stage coach full of people who take refuge in the wrong place at the wrong time. On board is the infamous Judge Driscoll (George Gordon) and his lovely fiancee Ruth (Liza Moreno) who are on their way to the altar with a fortune packed away in their belongings. Waiting at an abandoned rest stop is Loweman (Frank Latimore), the man Driscoll sent to prison years before so he could steal the man's gold mines. Meanwhile, the Apaches continue their attacks joined by another tribe. To make a bad situation worse, tensions are mounting, tempers flaring and Driscoll's connection to Ruth's first husband's death is revealed within the claustrophobic confines of the rest station. More of a Soap Opera than a Horse Opera, the personal bits of bitter history the characters share are as scary as the Indian raids.

It's a Douglas Sirk western! Imagine Almodovar in 1964, lensing a western!

The Western genre as our grandfathers knew it is, for the most part, dead. Westerns are still produced, but very seldom. Clint Eastwood, the last great master of the Western genre, hasn't made one in 12 years. The dusty excitement the Western provided to audiences two generations ago, like the grimy thrills of 70s crime thrillers, and the techo-shocks of today's quasi-sci-fi product, are all one and the same. It's the same story but in a different context. But what makes older films interesting is when it's seen in a different context, i.e. the Western as soap opera. It's what makes contemporary films interesting as well. Just watch!

 

Nightmare Theatre

Another cool one! Vintage audio from Nightmare Theatre with "Dr. Cadaverino" on WITI-TV in Milwaukee. The site's got a lot of great information, including the "Shock" horror movie package sold to local TV stations in the late 50s.

 

THE LATE-LATE-LATE SHOW

Picked up a tape from a local video shop yesterday, and now I'm completely obsessed about it. It's name is THE LATE-LATE-LATE SHOW, and it's a collection of trailers from Something Weird Video. As the copy on the box states:

For all you Insomniacs who saw these obscure European espionage movies, westerns, thrillers and historical dramas of the early Sixties on TV: The Fury of the Apaches, Danger of the Middle East, To Catch a Spy, Agent of Doom, MMM 83, X-Ray of a Killer, Lost Treasure of the Aztecs, Eyes of the Sahara, Dangerous Agent, King of the Vikings, Duel of Fire, Walls of Fear, Stranger from Hong Kong, Killer Spy, Secret File 1413, Operation Gold Ingot, Escape from Saigon, Headlines of Destruction, The Black Monocle, Death Pays in Dollars, Sergeant X of the Foreign Legion, Nest of Spies, Prisoner of the Jungle, Messalina, Hercules of the Desert, Sea Fighter, Destination Fury, Prisoner of the Iron Mask, Musketeers of the Sea, and the 1952 suspense short THE GENTLEMAN IN ROOM 6.

Even in this time of all-inclusive film scholarship and, thanks to the internet, a very informed fanbase with reams of documentation at their fingertips, these are films that are, for the most part, forgotten. Most the films whose trailers I saw were European spy thrillers (mainly French from what I can ascertain) produced in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This was before Bond-mania took over half of the world, and Euro-spy programmers became parodies and goofy pop-art extravaganzas. But what of their predecessors, these very humble and earnest black and white thrillers? As Something Weird's box copy so implies: these were cheap gut-bucket flicks that local TV needed to fill holes in their schedule. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, time needed to be filled for programming, and movies were the cheapest way to fill that time. Mainly these were packages from studios like A.I.P. that were mainly european programmers picked up for a song and then re-edited, cheaply dubbed and retitled. If you're old enough, maybe you remember a morning movie, or an afternoon movie, maybe tied in to a sweepstakes or contest. Remember when there used to be Late Late Movies, and not infomercials?

I certainly do. Watch this space for more information. I intend to track some of this stuff down.

 

Euro-Spy Royale

Here's something cool, a gallery of European spy movie posters from the 1960s!

 

Genuine Dislike of Mel Gibson

"His actions were also partially due to a genuine dislike of Mel Gibson...." For some reason I find this very funny. He's got some balls, that kid!