Luis Buñuel is Still a Great Director (thank god)

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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

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

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

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

Movie Gun Gallery

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

"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

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).

Cinema Diabolico

Very cool collection of Mexican horror and wrestling movie posters and lobby cards, part of Pulp Morgue, a repository of pulp art and ephemera. One of many wonderful finds divined from Bibi's Box.

Death at Disneyland

The Happiest Place on Earth? A detailed and sad history of fatal accidents at the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim by John Marr, publisher of the zine Murder Can Be Fun.

Weekend Poster Feast 6

Weekend Poster Feast 6. Not a movie poster, per se, but what looks like a crazily hyperbolic newspaper ad for a double feature of Keep Talking, Baby (Cause toujours, mon lapin) (1961), and Ladies' Man (Lemmy pour les dames (1961), both starring the great Eddie Constatine. Constatine is best known as tough guy Lemmy Caution in Godard's Alphaville, the craggy faced throw-back alpha-male pitted against the cruelly efficient Alpha 60 supercomputer, the Tarzan against IBM, as it were. Constantine made his name in Europe as a cabaret singer and then moved on to play hardboiled American heroes like Lemmy Caution and Nick Carter in French films in the '50s. Constantine's new bride said, in an interview in 1977 (when Eddie was 62, mind you): "I've had five husbands, and Eddie is the best lover of them all." Who needs James Bond or Our Man Flint? Yes indeed!

Online Viewing Tips

Some online viewing tips. A series of five minute cartoons from Cartoon Network Mexico featuring masked wrestling superhero El Santo. Pretty nicely done, in a sleek Batman and Teen Titans sort of way. Santo battles mummies and clones in Mexico, D.F. In Spanish (as if that would stop you).

Via WFMU's blog, a preview of The Found Footage Festival, a compendium of stupid home videos, foul mouthed outtakes and tantrums, and incredibly violent training tapes. Entertaining and enlightening.

And lastly, one definitely not for the kiddies. Via Warren Ellis, a cheaply and crudely animated version of a Tijuana Bible, featuring a third-rate Bugs Bunny rip-off, cartoon animals as sailors and pirates, naked cartoon women, moronic racial sterotypes, and a whole bunch of squishy sex. Who the hell made this cartoon? It looks like it was made in the '60s or '70s, probably made for stag parties or smokers. Despite its crude look and sub-Hanna-Barbara animation, it looks somewhat professional -perhaps a lark produced by easily amused (or bored) animators in between jobs. An interesting cultural artifact, I suppose. Probably not worksafe.

Up the Academy!

Henceforth, let it be known (at least by me) that the Oscar known as the Academy Award for Best Achievement in Direction has no grounding in even the most objective criteria of what can be considered "good direction". This so-called "award" shall not be considered in any way a yardstick of cinematic quality or artistic vision, but instead something akin to a Hollywood Chamber of Commerce "Good Citizenship" award. Considering the background of many of the recipients in the past 20 years, perhaps it should change its name to the "Actor Does Good" Award.

Let it also be known that for a filmmaker to be shunned or snubbed by the so-called "Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences" is not a detriment, but, instead, a credit to an artist's worth. Let it also be understood that the collective work of those not worthy enough to be so "honored", by any qualitative measurement, is far, far superior to the collective work of those who have won (and in this case -if it's close at all- it's because of the heavy lifting of a few: like Ford, Wilder, Huston, maybe Coppola, Bertolucci, and Polanski, and maybe Spielberg on a good day).

While all this may painfully obvious to many of you, this bite-sized piece of rancor was mainly created to assuage those (like myself) who had hoped against hope that perhaps this was the year the Academy would bend to finally honor America's Greatest Living Filmmaker. That Martin Scorsese, despite his outsider status, used every culinary trick and ingredient in his filmic kitchen to appeal to Academy tastes in his last two outings (historical feasts: grand, epic, sweeping, with big stars, and even bigger budgets), still he fell short of garnering the prize. Maybe it was a cynical attempt by Scorcese to rig the game, knowing that a movie like The Aviator had Oscar written all over it, and that this was his best shot. All the undeniably great films he made that had never won were much too raw, violent, and strange for the Academy, so he may have tried to smooth this wrinkles out in The Aviator. It could have worked, but, the problem remained: he's still Martin Scorsese. The Aviator, grand mess that it is, still had as its core, a morally ambivalent and somewhat unsympathetic main character. Howard Hughes is a classic Scorsese hero in much the same vein as Johnny Boy and Charlie, Travis Bickle, Jake La Motta, Rupert Pupkin, or even Jesus Christ. And the Academy doesn't like weird characters... give them a gruff old boxing trainer with a heart of gold anytime.

Like the scorpion in Welles' Mr. Arkadin, it's in Scorsese's nature to have such uncompromising aspects in even such a compromising effort. And it's also in the nature of the Academy (the Hollywood elite, if you like... dull and conservative to a fault) to shun such irregularities, to turn their heads away from the weird and the colorful. If you're going to have to have a kink in the proceedings (such as euthunasia), at least let it be stately. One thing Scorsese is not, is stately.

So, once again, the asthmatic kid from Little Italy is uninvited to the big party. Well, Marty, if they don't let them play in their yard, fuck 'em. There's nicer fields all around.

Deutsche Kinostars

More film ephemera... Photos and info on Postwar German movie stars(in German). I've always been fascinated by this kind of international pop cinema that flies under the North American radar (our cultural NORAD?), and ends up in the sad margins of recollection, barely on the tip of the tongue of dumb memory. Most of the films featured on the site appear to be melodramas or comedies, movies that would not have easily translated to American tastes (unlike the fantastical Krimis, which at least showed up as second features at drive-ins or downtown fleapits or on late night television). The stars themselves were attractive enough, although they didn't seem to make much of a splash outside West Germany (or German speaking environs), unlike, say, Curt Jurgens, Hardy Kruger, Gert Frobe, or Karin Dor (although a lot of these aforementioned actors made their transatlantic bones on Bond films, oddly enough). Another chapter in the secret history of cinema.

Batman The TV Show

KAPOW! occurs 50 times, which makes it the most often used sound effect graphic used in the old 1960s Batman TV series. Coming in second on this wonderfully compiled list is that old standby POW! with a respectable 49 times. Not far behind is ZAP! with a 42 count. There's also a list of cameo celebrity appearances, plus a whole bunch of bat-details and minutiae for your surfing pleasure. A bunch of batvideos can be seen here, including Burt Ward's screen test with Adam West in a Batman Year One style insignia on his chest.

Weekend Poster Feast 5

Weekend Poster Feast 5. Have Negligee...will travel...! Meet Mari Lou... the blonde on fire! Meet Mari-Lou...Once she starts she can't stop... Mari-Lou...Hiway Pick-Up...She Couldn't Resist Men...Any Man! Kathy Marlowe...That Girl on Fire Who Starts In Where Mansfield and Monroe Leave Off!

Just some of the taglines for the wonderfully titled Girl with an Itch (1958), a tawdry potboiler of a b-movie taken from a paperback from the bottom of a squeaky book rack. I really don't know anything about this movie, except that it features Robert Armstrong, who played Carl Denham in King Kongand Robert Clarke, whose been in tons of cheap horror flicks from The Astounding She Monster, The Hideous Sun Demon, and Frankenstein Island. And I really haven't any information on the aforementioned Kathy Marlowe, except that she apparently came out in Phil Karlson's The Phenix City Story, which I remember as a pretty good gritty film about a totally corrupt city in Alabama. The poster has a certain old school prurience that seems innocent nowadays, almost sweet. You can get a fridge magnet with the poster's image. If you're really interested, Something Weird is selling the film in VHS.

Click on the image for a larger version. 326K.

Chess In The Cinema

What do the films The Seventh Seal, 2001, An American Werewolf in London, Monkey Business, and The Abominable Dr. Phibes have in common? They all feature scenes with chess playing. These films, and many, many more, are featured in the Chess In The Cinema site, which exhaustively tries to list every movie with a scene featuring either chess playing, or even a chessboard. They have a count of 604 so far, and I'll be damned if I could find one that they've missed.

R.I.P. Simone Simon

Another loss in the film world. French actress Simone Simon died today in Paris at the age of 93. She is best known for her role as the enigmatic and troubled Irena Dubrovna in Val Lewton's 1942 production of Jacques Tourneur's Cat People. It's an intriguing film, cast in pools of light and shadow, thick with mystery, and handling the subtexts of female frigidity and sexual awakening with a deftness that films of that time just didn't approach (unless it was a low-budget horror movie). Simon's performance was a key part of the movie's success. Her Irena is soft, vulnerable, perhaps ingenuously earnest; but behind her pretty and exotic eyes, as she melts into the shadows, we can sense her rigidly held surface melting as well, failing to keep the beast in check.

Hollywood was just a small part of her career. Simon starred in Jean Renoir's La Bête Humaine in 1938, and in Max Olphuls' La Ronde and Le Plaisir in 1950 and 1952 respectively. She retired from the movie industry in 1956 and, for nearly 50 years, presumably never looked back.

The Quatermass Restoration

A very interesting (and technical) piece on the restoration and eminent DVD release of the classic BBC productions of Nigel Kneale's Quatermass teleplays. A lot of care has been given to the these old '50s kinescopes, and it looks like it'll be a nice presentation. Hopefully, a Region 1 release is in the works.

R.I.P. Dan O'Herlihy

Lost among the obituaries of the past week was the passing of 85 year old Irish actor Dan O'Herlihy. O' Herlihy built quite a list of credits. He made his film debut in Carol Reed's Odd Man Out, and made his splash in Hollywood playing Macduff in Orson Welles' Macbeth. He may be more familiar to some as the "Old Man" in the RoboCop films, and as a reptilian extraterranean in The Last Starfighter. He was also in John Huston's swan song The Dead.

O' Herlihy is probably best known for his title role in Luis Buñuel's Las Adventuras de Robinson Crusoe, for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in 1954 (although the film was shot in 1952). The movie was a first of a many things for Buñuel: his first color film, his first all-English language film, and his first to receive an Academy Award nomination; and Robinson Crusoe may seem, on the surface, atypical for Buñuel, but it contains many touches that are exclusively Buñuel: the erotic charge when Robinson sees the fluttering wind tossed garments on the scarecrow, and also when Friday puts on those same garments (and Robinson quickly tells him to remove them); the theological discussion between Robinson and Friday in which Robinson fails to convince the pagan Friday of the moral superiority of Christianity. What also makes the film is O'Herlihy's performance, and the transformation his character takes from being a callous slave trader to a man overwhelmed by loneliness, from a man who sees Friday as a servant, and then as a comrade, then as a friend. It's a remarkable performance, especially when there are many scenes where it is just O'Herlihy, the beach, the jungle, and the camera.

My favorite O'Herlihy role may be that as General Warren Black in Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe (usually dismissed as the overly serious flipside to Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, but is just as good, in my book, and may even be better after Strangelove's time worn jokiness wears off). O'Herlihy pays a dovish general who is ordered to make the ultimate sacrifice at the film's chilling climax. "There's nothing more to be said," he says coldly, muffled by a black oxygen mask in the cockpit of the B-52. He then recites his last orders and performs his last act, horrible and unimaginable, as the rest of the crew watch, frozen in terror. We hear just the whine of the bomber's jets, heavy breathing, and these words: "The matador...the matador...."

Stars Pushing Lux

A small but nifty gallery of French magazine ads from 1930 to 1984 featuring some very big stars pushing Lux soap, from Hollywood beauties such as Susan Hayward and Marilyn Monroe to international film figures such as Ursula Andress, Marina Vlady, to a very lovely and feminine Simone Signoret (a revelation after only seeing her in Les Diaboliques and Curtis Harrington's Games).

Weekend Poster Feast 4

Weekend Poster Feast 4. A stark and elegant design distinguishes this Japanese poster of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema. John Waters called Teorema his favorite "art" film, which ought to give an indication of its transgressive power. Click on the image on the left for a larger version of the image. 460K

Xtreme Loonacy

There's been much hubbub and hand wringing consternation among interweb wags about the "re-imagining" (new Hollywood speak for "remaking" or "insipid recycling") of Bugs and the rest of the Warner Brothers cartoon gang as the Loonatics. The story, if you don't know it by now, concerns a crackerjack group of superheroes doing battle with evildoers and other assorted nogoodniks in the far off year of 2772. These heroes are updated versions of the classic Warner Brothers' characters we've all grown up watching, but now drawn with sharper angles, meaner faces with bad-ass glares, and clad in black and flourescent colors. To wit, these characters are:

Buzz (Bugs Bunny): Team leader with laser and martial arts expertise
Duck (Daffy Duck): Weapons expert with built-in sonar
Roadster (Road Runner): Super speed
Spaz (Tasmanian Devil): Team muscle with jaws of steel
Lexi (Lola Bunny): Disguise expert with super hearing
Slick (Wile E. Coyote): Vehicles and surveillance; regeneration abilities

Disregarding whether or not Lola Bunny is a part of the Warners' canon, Loonatics doesn't seem especially egregious compared to other Warners' attempts to exploit and recycle their famous cartoon characters. Doesn't anyone remember Tiny Toons, Space Jam, Baby Looney Tunes or any of the crappy repackaging of old shorts linked by newly (and horribly) animated footage that came out in the early '80s? Certainly, Loonatics is an outrageous and cynical update, and yet another sign of a dearth of imagination in the major studios; but, really, is that anything new? True cartoonheads aren't probably going to watch the series, or if they're especially curious, give it a cursory look, and the series will probably fade without consequence into the fuzzy background of our consciousness. The victims of this bastardization are not so much the legacies of Chuck, Tex, Friz, and Bob, but as Amid from Cartoon Brew aptly put it, "...[the] countless modern creators out there who have ideas...who have something to say...and it's a slap in the face of every talented artist working in this business whenever a major animation studio chickens out like this. Shoving a tired rabbit down America's throat for the umpteenth time will never reap WB the rewards of giving America a great new cartoon star, an honestly-created cartoon that speaks to our time and place..."

Well said. If you're curious on how Loonatics is going to look, here's a Quicktime preview.

Mp3 Heads Up - Italian Style

A movie mp3 heads up --The Stypod, Stylus Magazine's mp3 blog has three mp3s from slassic '70s Italian horror films (well, actually two horror films, and one giallo if one wants to be pedantic), Goblin's theme from Argento's Suspiria, Fabio Frizzi's main theme from Fulci's Zombie, and, best of all, Ennio Morricone's little heard theme from Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. Good cuts all, and an excellent way to introduce yourself to the wonderful and weird world of Italian genre film soundtrack music ('70s style).

Tons of Titles

"What is it? A unique catalog of movies on video...specifically, screen captures of movie title screens!" Over 3130 titles are available on Steven Hill's Movie Title Screens Page, an incredible collection and undertaking. It's not only a snapshot history of film, but also a history of popular typefaces and graphic design, from Caligari to Alien Vs. Predator.

Posters From Egypt

Here's a nice collection of Egyptian movie posters from the 1950s to the present day. The older ones are the best, as the more recent ones try to ape modern Western styles ( has movie poster art ever been worse than it is right now?)

Weekend Poster Feast 3

Weekend Poster Feast 3. It's easy to lose oneself in the gaze of Barbara Steele. This brittle beauty found a home in the gothic opera of Italian horror films after floundering for a couple of years in the British and American film industry. Where Anglo-Saxon minds faltered in succesfully framing her unorthodox countenance, it took an Italian like Mario Bava to see in her saucer eyes and the cruel cut of her face an expression of centuries of betrayal, treachery, and perdition. One can perhaps see her as Lucrezia Borgia (the greatest role she never played), or perhaps Elizabeth Bathory. In any case, Steele was extraordinary in the dual role in La Machera del Demonio (Black Sunday), and she would never be as great again. Click on the image on the left for a much larger picture. (540K)

Jewish Movies

Here's a nice site on Jewish themed and influenced films. It's mainly a review site, but the reviews are very well thought out and well written (and there's a ton of them). On Barry Levinson's Liberty Heights: "But while this film shows in bittersweet detail what looking beyond one's culture is good for, it never questions why both boys don't fall for Jewish girls. If virtually every -coming-of-age Jewish movie didn't feature the hero always falling for a "Shiksa", I wouldn't question it either, but Jewish girls in these films are either nonexistent, or they are featured as overly aggressive (in this film, they are just nonexistent)." On the 1959 Ben Hur: "...these noble, Hollywoodized characterizations create a wider gap between the races (and the truth) when one is confronted with the way Semites really looked, and I personally think that faith is something that deserves an honest representation. I'm not trying to be "PC". If people want to believe that this Semite Jew named Ben Hur really looked like Peer Gynt on steroids, that's fine. Faith is also illusion, and this is after all just a story of one person's experience of being touched by Christ. It's metaphorical. But in my mind, as a movie, this is just a case of bad acting (Hawkins is good) and bad direction. But the Academy gave it 11 awards. What do I know?"

The site also has a nice collection of Goldwynisms. My favorite: "If I look confused it's because I'm thinking."

Don Martin Dept.

Don Martin Dept. The Nearsighted Voodoo Priest, an impossibly cruel, incredibly tasteless, and no doubt anthopologically incorrect comic strip from the great Don Martin. I picked this off of usenet, laughed out loud, and suddenly remembered how much loved Mad Magazine and especially Don Martin (and Sergio Aragones and his "marginalia" and Antonio Prohias and his fantastic "Spy Vs. Spy") when I was an impressionable tyke. More Martin stuff: The Don Martin Shrine. Don Martin Collector's Page.

George W. Bush and Hollywood

George W. Bush, Filmmaker? Certainly a stretch, but Psychotronic Video Guide's Michael J. Weldon points out an extended piece that from 1983 to 1992 Bush was on the board of Silver Screen Management, a firm that produced films for Tri Star and then Disney. Bush, of course, was never credited on any of the movies Silver Screen Management produced (he seems to a well-connected moneyman, if anything), but Weldon speculates on Bush's involvement in the process of moviemaking: " I'd love to know if GWB did anything besides lend his famous name and share in the profits of these movies. Did he help secure locations, read or approve scripts or make casting suggestions? Did he attend premieres and party with the stars?"

The films themselves? Silver Screen Management produced 74 major release features while Bush was on the board, and most of them are hardly memorable --the sort of instantly forgettable Hollywood product that used to gather dust on Blockbuster shelves in the late '80s and show up on pay channels to fill up the hole in their schedules: The Black Cauldron, My Science Project, Tough Guys (with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas), Adventures in Babysitting, Can't Buy Me Love, Ernest Goes to Camp, the shitty remake of D.O.A., V.I. Warshawski. Bush scored some hits, too: Three Men and a Baby, Cocktail, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, The Little Mermaid. The common thread for all these films was that these were the one of the first manifestations of creeping corporatism that now seems to run Hollywood: the high concept package deal, heavy duty marketing and focus group surveys, the gleaming perfect surface of glitz, spectacle, and sentiment. Entertainment was always a commodity in Hollywood, but in the '80s it became a science. Weldon writes: "Note how well Silver Screen Management practiced product placements, recycling (remaking French films) and outsourcing (filming in other countries)." Indeed, one can make analogies to Bush's style of politics: the spectacle, the control and marketing of image and message, product placement (Hallibuton, any one?), the manufactured edginess of Bush's maverick image, the thumbs-up platitudes. It's like some forgotten '80s movie, only it's not relegated to a 2 AM showing on The Movie Channel. It's live.

Weekend Poster Feast 2

Weekend Poster Feast 2. The Astounding She Monster, classic 1950s drive-in exploitation... well, at the least the poster and marketing. The actual movie itself? See here for a review and screenshots and make up your own mind to search it out. Click on the image on the left for a much larger image (350K).

Ultra-violent comix from Hong Kong

Brutally insane collection of ultra-violent hyper-gory comic book covers from Hong Kong from the late '60s to the present, from what I can surmise. The early ones are the best, if you dig the primitively surreal. Even Bruce Lee gets into the act. I don't know much about these comix, but apparently they're very popular. Found via the German blog The Crime in Your Coffee, who found it via another German blog, Scheinriese, who found it through a Chinese blog MegaroGolith2004 (with a sketchy but helpful translation from Google here). Whew!

Scans of the '60s German magazine "Film"

Very nice gallery of scans (covers and sample pages) of the 1960s German magazine Film. From The Cartoonist, a very fine weblog.

More SF from Italy

More SF from Italy. An excellent collection of cover scans of science fiction magazines and paperbacks published under the Arnoldo Mondadori imprint can be found at Mondo Urania (Mondadori was also responsible for giallo fiction). If you're interested in some of the more far out illustrations, click on the Urania link on the page, and you would find scans of 1500 covers of I romanzi di Urania, alongside a synopsis (in Italian, of course) of that month's novel (usually by an American or British author).

Antonio Margheriti

Even among genre fans, Italian director Antonio Margheriti's name and reputation provokes little, if any, recognition. A simple and quick glance at his prolific filmography reveals a panoply of popular film genres, from Westerns to gothic horror, from muscle-man pictures to spy spoofs, and from giallos to sex romps. Margheriti, who often signed his films with the Anglo-Saxon sobriquet "Anthony Dawson" in order to sound more American (a common ruse in the Italian film industry), had his hand in so many genres, some may consider him a journeyman, a technician, a director-for-hire, or, less charitably, a hack. While Margheriti does have his defenders, particularly in his horror efforts such as Castle of Blood (Video Watchdog's Tim Lucas called him "The Third Man of Italian Fantasy", after gold and silver medalists Mario Bava and Riccardo Freda respectively), I feel his reputation will rest mainly on his gloriously frenetic and bizarre pop-art science fiction movies from the 1960s, a genre which had no antecedent in the Italian cinema before Margheriti pretty much built it from the ground up.

Before 1968, when Kubrick's 2001 made its grand splash and established new criteria for the portrayal of space travel on the screen, the SF space film was a hearty runt of a genre, although one whose history stretched back to Georges Melies and his Trip to the Moon. Since Melies' initial trip, other notable space movies graced the theaters like the 1924 Soviet allegory Aelita, Queen of Mars, Fritz Lang's follow-up to Metropolis, 1929's Woman on the Moon, and that fantastic mixture of hard SF and American ingenuity and optimism Destination Moon. By the early 1960s, the dawn of the space age, movies dealing with space travel had become common. The Soviets brought an element of socialist utopianism into the mix with films like Planeta Burg (Planet of Storms, which exhibited excellent special effects and design, but which also carried itself with the stodginess of a Politburo overcoat (but not too stodgy for it to be re-edited by Curtis Harrington and Peter Bogdanovich, under the aegis of Roger Corman, as Voyage to a Prehistoric Planet and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women). Other films from the Eastern Bloc which also followed the utopian lead include East Germany's Der Schweigende Stern (known in the US as First Spaceship on Venus, and based on a Stanislaus Lem novel), and the remarkable Ikarie XB 1 (Voyage to the End of the Universe) from Czechoslovakia (which deserves it's own post!). While the SF space films from the Warsaw Pact were heavy and serious, space movies from Hollywood tended towards the juvenile with efforts like The Angry Red Planet, 12 to the Moon (which featured the photographic skills of the great John Alton), although there were good films like Robinson Crusoe on Mars which treated the subject matter with a modicum of respect, if not scientific verisimilitude.

Which leads us to Antonio Margheriti. While there has always been an element of the fantastic in Italian cinema, it usually stemmed from stories from antiquity and mythology (such as the peplum films which featured muscle-bound heroes like Hercules and Maciste and their laborious exploits against evil tyrants, treacherous queens, remarkable monsters), or borrowing from the previous century with the supernatural gothic horrors helmed by the likes of Bava and Freda, never did the Italians look to the future for their fantasy. Which is not to say Italians didn't have a taste for SF. After the war, science fiction stories and novels printed in periodicals such as Cosmo and, more importantly, Urania became extraordinarily popular. Mainly, these were translations of American and British SF by authors such as Asimov, Clarke, Sturgeon. As there was little appetite for home grown SF in Italy in the '50s and early '60s, so when Margheriti decided to direct his first space picture Space-Men (Assignment: Outer Space) in 1961, he took the name of "Anthony Daisies" (a strict transliteration of "Antonio Margheriti") in order to hide his nationality (a common ruse among Italian filmmakers in the '50s and '60s -- even Sergio Leone signed his films as "Bob Robertson" once upon a time). As the first Italian space film, Space-Men set an important precedent. As Phil Hardy writes in his Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction:

"One of the strengths of even the worst of Italian Science Fiction is the visual sense of its designers and set decorators.... the space stations, moons and asteroids of Italian Science Fiction have an imaginative vibrancy about them about them that connects as much with fantasy as with the sober, however pulp inspired, Anglo-American predictions of the look of the future. When, in addition, such films are directed by the likes of babe... or, as here, Margheriti, a director with an equally keen visual style, the results can be superb."

The film was made on a shoestring -- 49 million lire, which translates to $30,000, which in 1960/61 was an extraordinarily paltry sum, especially for a movie which deals with space travel and requires plenty special visual effects. Nowadays, hipsters raised on MST3K and Ed Wood's pie tins snicker derisively when Margheriti's spacemen float by on visible piano wire and the spaceship's exhaust flares like an out of control Zippo, but one should overlook these handicaps and instead focus on the manic imagination and visual flair of Margheriti's space films. Especially with the weird I criminali delle galassia (best known by it's English title The Wild, Wild Planet). Candy colored pop-art spaceship interiors, dancers dressed like butterflies, disembodied organs tremble to life, kidnap victims shrunk to the size of dolls to fit into attache cases, automatons in wraparound shades and black leather, and an explosion of red at the end.... Not great art, but pulp art at least, with the kind of unfettered imagination that is hard to find in today's overly expensive and overly marketed sci-fi extravaganzas. What could Lucas do with $30,000 (or adjusted for inflation. $300,000? Maybe he could get off his ass and make a real movie instead of a toy tie-in.

Academia gives Margheriti his props with an overly serious entry in Senses of Cinema's Great Directors database. There's also a treasure trove of images and video at the official Antonio Margheriti tribute site run by Margheriti's son Edoardo. The best things on the site are the collection of trailers of many of Margheriti's movies, plus a really cool behind the scenes look at Wild, Wild Planet shot for Italian TV.

Then there's the question of authorship of Flesh for Frankenstein (aka Andy Warhol's Frankenstein. There are proponents for both sides: Margheriti's and Paul Morrissey's. There's one thing that's certain: the breathing disembodied pair of lungs in Frankenstein are the same found in Wild, Wild Planet, designed by the great Carlo Rambaldi.

We Jam Econo

For your viewing pleasure -- a trailer for the upcoming Minutemen doc We Jam Econo. Besides the promise of seeing some smoking Minutemen footage, you can also see how gracefully your favorite '80s punk rocker has aged in some present day interview clips. Ian MacKaye looks the embodiment of straight edge health; J. Mascis looks like someone's hippie mom; ed fROMOHIO doesn't look so hot; George Hurley looks like a cross between a robust and healthy Zuma Beach lifeguard and Freddie Blassie; and, yeah, Thurston, we know you have a badass record collection.

Weekend Poster Feast

Weekend Poster Feast. Barbarella, Queen of the Galaxy, done up Japanese pop art style. Here's a nice Barbarella site, which professes not to "honor Jane Fonda or her political views". Oh well. Click on the image on the left for a larger version.

Godard on Monster Movies

Godard on Monster Movies (from a series of lectures presented at the Conservatoire d'Art Cinématographique de Montréal in 1980). Portions of the lectures are included in these film film notes from the Pacific Film Archive (as gif image files). Some excerpts:

"The true monster film is Grease, or Saturday Night Fever... Because one has no fear.....

"I believe that there were few movies in the genre of Dracula, Nosferatu, Frankenstein where [the monster] was not totally invented; frightening, but separate from reality.... A movie was never made about a worker's strike using Dracula, which would be useful; or films about the mafia. Suck the blood or take the money - there's no real difference....

"One could imagine Germany, Year Zero being made in another manner; it would not be disorienting to see, all of a sudden, Bela Lugosi cross the screen....

"There are few films that attempt the two together. When Frankenstein was made, one could have put him into a monstrous social situation... the Depression.... It appears at moments, but the film doesn't treat it, it treats it separately.... I would rather try to treat the two together.....

"Dracula is somebody from another world in today's world. One says Dracula doesn't exist, but through 3/4 of the film you have only to see how the people are dressed.... Still today on all the boards of directors, in all of high society, people are dressed like this. So, where are the monsters? Who are the monsters? Dracula's house is absolutely the house of Dupont de Nemours.... Do you think they would have had the idea of shooting in another kind of house? Your ideas come from the world you come from... you get ideas only from seeing things. If I had seen only Dracula, I never would have had this idea. But as I see Germany, Year Zero just before or after, I find... cosmic links between these films.... Berlin is the tomb of Dracula. It's effectively Hitler's genius.... If you had put a little mustache on Dracula...."

Ingrid Bergman - Swedish Magazines

Nice collection of scans of Swedish magazine covers featuring Ingrid Bergman, including some that predate her Hollywood career.

Pepsi Vs. Coke

The trailer for Rialto's re-release of Godard's 1965 paeon to youth and pop Masculine Feminine is up, a snazzy little montage of clips from the movie set to a hip little number by one of the film's stars, Chantal Goya ("Tu m'as trop menti", to be exact). Curiously, the trailer's tagline is "Paris, Sex, and the Pepsi Generation", while Godard always claimed it was about "The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola". Surely, Marx may have fallen out of favor with the young, but Coca-Cola? Cola wars aside, it's still a cause for celebration, and no doubt a Criterion DVD edition is around the corner.

Video Nasties in the UK

In Britain they were called "Video Nasties", European and American horror films with explicit sex and violence that could never be passed by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) for theatrical exhibition, but because of the nascent home video explosion in the early '80s, were found on the shelves of video shops without any sort of restrictions. Vying for the attention of the discriminating video consumer, many of these videos were packaged in the biggest and most explicitly garish boxes possible. The yellower segments of the British press get wind of all this and raise holy hell, and the government, of course, follows suit. Some distributors are prosecuted, and some "Nasties" seized. By 1984, the Video Recordings Act is passed by Parliament, and the brief flame of the "Nasties" era comes to an ignominious end. A very good history can be found here, and a brand new database of pre-certification "Nasties", built in conjunction with an upcoming book from Fab Press, can be found here, complete with over 7000 video cover scans.

Sexploitation Film Mags

We're not talking about Positif, Cahiers du Cinema, Sight and Sound, or Film Culture here. When these colorful slicks emblazoned their covers with the words "Art Films", don't expect any pontifications on Bergman or Brakhage, but instead expect a "Full Color Center Spread" and a special pre-release preview of the film Hot Miami. Titles like Cinema Close-Up, Barred, Bizarre Films, and Cinema Keyhole seemed to proliferate under the radar of the Look and Life mainstream in the '60s until the early '70s when hardcore reared its ugly, gnarled head, and rendered these magazines quaint, and perhaps not so daring.

From a very interesting site called Bad Mags, which details the sleazier aspects of magazine publishing in the '60s and the '70s, and which will be the subject of a volume coming out of Headpress, a publisher of fine books. And, yes, some of these links may not be work safe.

El Vampiro Sangriento

A meticulous labor of love: more than a hundred frame grabs from The Bloody Vampire, K. Gordon Murray's English language version of the Mexican horror film El Vampiro Sangriento. Alas, there's no text to explicate the images, so unless you've seen the movie (I haven't), you may be at a loss to know the significance of each image and how they relate to each other, except to possibly discover the odd, dusty poetry of some of them: the skeletal coach driver; the sloping arches; this mixture of eros and science; the vampire's tome; the frightened maiden and the jiggling ornate doorknob; a dinner table borrowed from Citizen Kane, and this outtake from L'Age d'Or; and a whole lot more. It looks exceptionally well shot in any case. Piece together the images and form your own narrative. Or check out the movie. It's probably not bad.

From the K. Gordon Murray website.

Welles' Quixote

Scroll down a bit and find an audio report (from PRI's Studio 360) on the long and strange history of Orson Welles' film production of Don Quixote. Self financed and languorously shot over a period of twenty odd years, it was the film masterpiece that never was, and most probably never will ever be completed to anyone's satisfaction. Not that some haven't tried to piece together Welles' footage that sits in various libraries, cinematheques, and personal collections throughout the world, most notably Eurotrash icon Jesus Franco. Franco, who served as second unit director on Welles' Chimes at Midnight, assembled what material was available (mainly in Spanish collections) and produced Don Quixote de Orson Welles in 1992. It was almost universally reviled on release, although some suggest it was Franco's participation (and his reputation as a cheapo porn director) that engendered the disdain (critic Jonathan Rosembaum called Franco "biggest hack in all of Spanish cinema!"). At any rate, this was the first time I've heard anything about Jess Franco on an American public radio program, and it contains some audio clips from Succubus and Venus in Furs! More importantly, there are clips from the Quixote soundtrack itself, with Welles voicing both Quixote and Sancho Panza. A very interesting listen. You can also find some screen captures of some European DVD editions of Don Quixote de Orson Welles here, courtesy of the great DVD Beaver.

Playing the Audience like an Organ

One can usually find interesting sources from the online syllabi of college film instructors. From a cinema history course taught by David Clearwater from the University of Lethbridge in Canada we find several audience reaction shots from a screening of Psycho during its original release in 1960. Read their faces from 45 years back in time. Their tension is palpable. I feel it's tremendously satisfying for us to be able to use the cinematic art to achieve something of a mass emotion. And with Psycho we most definitely achieved this. "It wasn't a message that stirred the audiences, nor was it a great performance or their enjoyment of the novel. They were aroused by pure film. "