A Weblog of Curious Things.
Media referred to by suffix as follows:
Sunday, 1st October, am
081.D: J. Moxey: Horror Hotel aka City of the Dead, 1960, b & w, widescreen, 75'54"
I should look up the dates but this British-made horror seems to have followed quickly in the wake of Psycho. In both a young woman sets out on a journey which takes her to a sinister hotel. In the second half of the picture her brother and boyfriend follow in her footsteps. There are some fearful symmetries within the picture which go with a name-game to suggest some sort of thought went into the piece. The black and white photography of an imagined New England in the grip of fog is sometimes impressive. It is all quite entertaining in a tongue-in-cheek way. The acting varies alarmingly from good to terrible and the script isn't up to much. Still it might do for Halloween. The print I saw was on one of the ultra-cheap Classic Entertainment Triple Bills, once widely available for a quid. This one is soft but tolerable and presented, surprisingly in its original aspect ratio.
Monday, 2nd October pm into Tuesday, 3rd October, am
256.D: Chaplin in Dough & Dynamite, 1914, 28'14"
215.D: H. Hughes: The Outlaw, 1941, b & w, 116'19"
D & D dates from Chaplin's Keystone period when he was making more or less a film a week. Mostly they were single-reel comedies but there were seven two-reelers and a six-reel feature. Dough & Dynamite has striking bakery-workers who plot revenge on their boss by sending a stick of dynamite into the shop, disguised as a loaf. It sounds promisingly political but at this date Chaplin was not leavening the heavy-handed slapstick with social criticism and we are not meant to dwell on the meaning of this anarchistic gesture: in this world a stick of dynamite seems to be just an amplified kick in the arse. There is some acknowledgment of the drudgery of labour in a subterranean kitchen and an interesting visual correlation between the elasticity of kneaded dough and the lanky shape of one of the workers. The louche atmosphere of these early movies is maintained in a scene where a streetwalker seems attracted to the store by the sign advertising Assorted French Tarts. She displays herself but is unimpressed by Charlie's attention and is soon on her way. It feels a long two reels, seeming to ramble without much sense of structure. When the comedy flags, I find myself wondering how closely these old films mirrored street life in America. Was there much of a mashing cult before the movies? Were bakeries typically in the basements of cafés? Did hotels look like one that keeps showing up on screen?
Sixty-five years on, The Outlaw remains controversial. Mainly unloved as a Western, I see some viewers still admire the heaving cleavage of La Russell. The odd ironic humour and lazy pacing seem to look forward to revisionist Westerns of the seventies though I guess this was really the Western reimagined as perverse screwball comedy. At a late stage, I'd guess, the musical score was doctored to nudge audiences into laughter by the crudest of means, a wah-wah trumpet. Elsewhere the score pinches pages of Tchaikovsky for what is, essentially, an interrupted love-tangle for three men. Playing Billy the Kid as a self-centred but appealing delinquent, Jack Beutel seems about fifteen years ahead of his time. Love and hate are hard to untangle in a story which flirts with sadomasochism, troilism and bondage. Even the horses are gay! Beutel gets to play Saint Sebastian in an early vision of extreme body-modification; I quite like the way his ears remain damaged for the rest of the movie and the blood-stains stay visible on his shirt. A little realism amid a thoroughly strange piece of cinema history.
Wednesday, 4th October, am
302.D: P. Almodóvar: All About my Mother, 1999, colour, widescreen, 97'00"
Though it is tempting to imagine Almodóvar's audience as consisting mainly of drug-addled drag-queens, I suspect he cannot subsist on them alone. His popularity must mainly be due to people who are just young, urban and too busy to do much thinking. His pink and fluffy walks on the wild side might furnish you with enough knowledge of modern cinema to get you through a shallow dinner. The stupidest strap-line I read this week advertised his movies by reminding us he is the best-known Spanish director since Buñuel.
The early anger and the later elegant irony of Buñuel are alike regions that Almodóvar cannot penetrate. Despite their elliptical condensed forms and reflexive obsession with cinema and the performing arts, the sensibility remains as banal as a Mexican soap-opera. He attracts some good actors and works with insolent assurance in this showy sub-genre of his own. But when you notice that the life-support machines in his favourite hospital settings have buttons in unlikely primary colours you know that his films relate to earlier cinema much as drag-queens relate to Bette Davis: imitations of imitations of life. As a transsexual gleefully takes to the stage to regale us with her operation-stories we may find that real-life has lapped the show. If we really need to hear stuff like this, we can get it across a table two streets away in English and live.
Thursday, 5th October, am
256.D: Chaplin in Caught in the Rain, aka In the Park, 1914, 12'34"
270.D: W. Herzog: Cobra Verde, 1985, Colour, widescreen, 110'20"
A surprise with the Chaplin film. This Delta DVD - Volume V of The Essential Chaplin - promised the 1915 Essanay 1-reeler called In The Park and the package contains a description of that picture. The title on the print is In The Park and it indeed begins with an episode of mashing in a park. As the film wore on and the location changed to a familiar-looking hotel, I realized that it was a different movie - one I had never seen and of which I had no alternative version. It took a few moments on the Internet to identify it as the 1914 Keystone 1-reeler whose original title was Caught in the Rain. These "masher" comedies are very louche in tone. I always wonder if America's parks were quite the hotbeds of casual sex they appear to be in them. Certainly the hotels depicted seem to be run along loose lines and the incidence of drunkenness adds to the sense of a world of iniquity. In this one, a respectable lady seems to be anything but: her displays of disapproval seem to be adopted for convention's sake. When night comes, she sleepwalks across the passageway and into Chaplin's bed.
Cobra Verde is not highly rated by its director or in most assessments of his work. I saw it first back in 1993 but I suspect that was an English language version on video. The DVD looks rather fine and I enjoyed the film a lot. There is not much talk, the story being told in images. These are often spectacular. Whether the Ghanian Film Board relished a picture about the rôle of tribal leaders in the slave-trade is uncertain. It appears that the bandit Cobra Verde was an invention of Bruce Chatwin. As always with Herzog it turns into an existential tale of one man - Kinski in his last collaboration with the director - against the universe. His death in the waves is memorable, watched by a crippled boy who walks on all fours.
Sunday, 8th October, am
256.D: Chaplin in The Tramp, 1915, 19'47"
049.D: A. Hitchcock: Frenzy, 1972, 111'03"
The Tramp is a somewhat mixed character in this Essanay 2-reeler: chivalrous at the start, he later proves a tyrant when the opportunity arises to bully a slow-witted farmhand. There is plenty of varied work to do on the farm but the bucolic idyll ends with his disappointment in love and the iris closes iconically as he wanders away.
Poor Blaney, downwardly mobile ex-RAF squadron-leader, public school manner adrift in a seventies world of casual employment, Sally Army hostels, prison and hospital ward. Returning to England for his ultra-dark penultimate movie, Hitchcock took full advantage of the newly-permissive censorship policy to deliver a shockingly protracted and hideous rape and murder. Shades of Psycho are not hard to find: the killer is the proprietor of a small business, living more or less over the shop. He loves his Mum though she lives down in Kent. His flat is hideously decorated even by contemporary standards of taste. The Tretchnikoff Green Ladies on the walls and the touristy Spanish picture depict his somewhat conventional and vague conceptions of a world beyond the walled garden. His ignorance of the world is demonstrated by his belief in a Jaffa, where the oranges come from.
Previous wrongly-accused Hitchcock characters have gone on a journey of discovery. Blaney never seems to get very far. His downward spiral is to some extent prefigured in Young & Innocent and the early version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, where middle-class figures find themselves in some shabby dens. These characters however tend to regain their status when the shadow of guilt is removed. Blaney is a less sympathetic figure, driven to attempt a murder in revenge for his own framing. He kills something dead but his isolation remains even when he is cleared of the original crime.
Ironic fruit and flowers are in nearly every frame of the film. Covent Garden is also an ironic Garden of Love, home of a marriage bureau with a half-eaten apple on the desk. We see marriage dissected as a diminishing appetite for the flesh and sex addressed in essentially excremental terms. Hitchcock had informed Truffaut of his dream of an alimentary symphony in film, the life of a great city told from food import to sewage outflow. It was a vision he effectively realized in Frenzy. I find it a downbeat and depressing movie. In the midst of it we have an unusually sympathetic but unglamorous female in the shape of Anna Massey but her candle illuminates the darkness but briefly.
Tuesday, 10th October, am
256.D: Chaplin in By the Sea, 1915, 9'26"
068.D: G. Beck: Behave Yourself, 1951, 79'57"
Mashing by the sea. Love-rivalry, male scrapping and bonding. Sun, sand and ice-cream. One of the shortest and least sophisticated films of Chaplin's Essanay period.
Midway between Rope and Senso Farley Granger tuned briefly to comedy in Behave Yourself, one of the strangest films to come from Hollywood in the early fifties. It's a doggie story in which a cute but unmanageable mutt heralds death for an ever-increasing circle of crooks. Paired with Shelley Winters and under the gaze of a ferocious mother-in-law, Granger shouts every line; the domestic scenes prefigure fifties television sitcom. But the darkness of the story hints at something like a worm in the bud of the domestic scene. When Ms Winters accidentally receives a case full of money her amoral delight and that of her mother suggest that a model home was not intended. The film is also surprisingly suggestive sexually with much undisguised profiling of the frustrations of living in the mother's house with a dog which is obstructing marital relations. The police are dense and the crooks weirdly and assortedly camp. You end up wondering what Billy Wilder might have made of it. The film was produced by Wald & Krasna in a co-production with RKO and it has fallen into the Public Domain. This print was not good with frequent scratches, several missing frames and jumps and a distorted music soundtrack. Bakaleinikoff's busy score is disfigured by pitch waverings but one theme seems to have been lifted by Tiomkin for Dial M for Murder. The cinematography by James Wong Howe is notably good and the fifties atmosphere is strong. Was the film hinting that fifties honey-I'm-home consumerism was built on thin ice beneath which endless perversities swam? I believe in Granger as a husband about as much as I believe in Shelley Winters having bacon for breakfast
Wednesday, 11th October, am
173.D: D. Fleischer: All's Well, animation, 1941, 6'38"
173.D: W: Lantz: Pantry Panic, animation, 1941, 6'52"
173.D: Hardaway & Dalton: Bars & Stripes Forever, animation, 1939, 7'25"
299.D: R. Rossellini: Francesco Giulliare di Deo, 1950, 82'34"
For every established and famous animated character there were probably dozens who were tried out briefly and found to lack audience appeal. Fliescher studios kept churning out Popeye well into the fifties but their attempts to establish other characters seemed doomed. All's Well introduces Gabby, a rubbery busy-body whose confidence in the song-title meets its come-uppance when he tries to change the nappy of a violently resisting baby. Most of the cartoon is taken up with a fight between these two equally unappealing characters. As animation it is technically fine but it outstays its welcome. A more familiar character, Woody Woodpecky features in Pantry Panic. The opening is charming and detailed as the warning of foul winter weather on the way makes the bird population board up their homes and head South. All that is except the woodpecker who settles down indoors to sit the winter out. When an indoor tornado empties the house of provisions, a passing pussy-cat looks like dinner. The stage is set for reciprocal attempts at turning cat or bird into dinner. Finally another visitor resolves the question at least temporarily. Finally a prison-set cartoon that may have been designed for an Edward G. Robinson picture. Dogs break from prison and a siege follows that looks like Warner Brothers. Only in colour. With hounds. The odd warden may be another caricature. The Chevalier imitation was probably topical too.
Fittingly given away with a newspaper, the Rossellini picture is a plotless series of episodes from the life of Francis of Assisi. At times it tends to reduce this gentle early commune to a nest of sweet little mice. Sometimes an air of homo-emotional intensity develops, quite disconcertingly when a crack-brained Brother seduces an ogrish tyrant by smiling at him till he repents. There are some magical moments here, some of them difficult to explain rationally: the arrival of the visiting sisters is joyously conceived. Rossellini was not a believer but his evident enjoyment of these fables makes for a most uplifting experience. No professional actors were used; they could have added nothing. Not a movie for everyone but a great discovery for me. Visually this restored print looks very beautiful; the soundtrack is very thin and distorted however. Possibly the most interesting newspaper freebie yet!
Thursday, 12th October, am
270.D: W. Herzog: Cobra Verde, 1985, Colour, widescreen, version with commentary, 110'19"
Herzog tells us that that Amazons are wild but Kinsky was wilder. Some people were very nice. He is correct to say that the epic scale of his movies belies their budget. We learn that the sand burns in hot places. Heritage sites can save a great deal of set-building. That today he would not keep the camera so long on a deformed boy. How much of the commentary would have been worth setting down on paper? A little of it. A paragraph twice the size of this, perhaps. But is a week since I heard it and I have forgotten half.
Thursday, 12th October, pm
257.D: Chaplin in Work, 1915, 24'22"
The pretences of polite society are undermined by a beady-eyed look at the labour which underpins it. Cheating at work and on the home front are reflections of fallen nature. It all ends with a bang.
Friday, 13th October, pm
257.D: Chaplin in A Woman, 1915, 19'46"
301.D: P. Almodóvar: Live Flesh, 1997, colour, widescreen, 96'34"
For once there are no transvestites in the Almodóvar picture but Chaplin supplies the lack in one of his most anarchic pictures. It is as if the malicious mischief he wreaks in the park cannot satisfy his chaotic urges. The men he has violently assaulted there encounter him as a counterfeit woman. Associated with water from the start, his fluid nature must call everything into question.
The tortuous relationships of Live Flesh are said to comprise a critique of the Franco régime. While is often said to have a special feeling for women, it is his handling of the macho males which seems more penetrating. Not since Buñuel's Tristana haas there been such curious fetishized play with disability.
Sunday, 15th October, am
143.V: Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius, BBC Live Broadcast, St. Paul's Cathedral, r. 26.11.1997, 113'34" (96'18" music)
We might have expected the BBC to celebrate its 70th Anniversary with something more suitably naff. A football game perhaps. It coincided with the 300th Anniversary of the opening of the East aisle of St. Paul's so the curious notion of combining the celebrations with a performance of Elgar's masterpiece may have seemed fitting to someone in the hierarchy. Against all the odds, it was a splendid occasion. A pity the stereo soundtrack can no longer be tracked on this tape of the live event. Langridge is a fine Gerontius, employing the palid English tone for expressive purposes but capable of expanding towards the more Italianate style the composer preferred. Alastair Miles was impressive as Priest and Angel of the Agony while Catherine Wyn-Rogers was a radiant Angel, if not the most individual. Andrew Davis seemed to begin the Prelude very slowly but the currents soon began to flow and his pacing was excellent. A real sense of occasion took over, though probably the solemn visuals were not especially helpful, despite some very impressive shots of the location. Mercifully we were spared any shots of the celebrity audience during the performance but a few were picked out afterwards. I spotted James Callaghan symbolizing Labour. Geoffrey Howe Conservative. John Birt was then still in charge. Perhaps his Catholic background determined the choice of work. Football pundit Jimmy Hill was on display. I wonder if it was a compulsory affair?
Wednesday, 18th October, am
156.V: A. Sjöberg: Hets, Torment AKA Frenzy, 1944, 96'28"
Troubled youth in wartime Sweden where a boy from a nice home loses his head over a shop-girl during the exam season. His sadistic Latin master is also doing some homework at the girl's flat. It is all treated in the grandest style with some powerful expressionist scenes but it peaks too soon, as adolescents are prone to. With Miss Zetterling off the scene, the laddie has to sort his head out with the aid of some concerned but very dull adults. Not hard to find in the sadistic master a reflection of Sweden's uncomfortable accommodations with Nazism but the script, by the young Ingmar Bergman also seems determined to flay the cramming system of Sweden's school. Interesting to see that the ritual of sitting exams in the gymnasium continues unaltered in Europe's schools today.
Thursday, 19th October, am
211.V: B. Ross: The Young Poisoner's Handbook, 1995, 94'59"
211.V: C. Morris: Jam No.5, 2000, 22'37"
Troubled youth English style. A version of the life of Graham Young, teenage poisoner who, incarcerated for a family murder, was freed to repeat his toxic revenge on his workmates. From early on when he tries to tell the chemist he is the son of a GP, the polite and articulate boy seems to have ambitions above his lower middle-class station. His voice-over is unfailingly positive if somewhat lacking in empathy. The film-makers make sure that his victims are depicted in a most unflattering light. I have seen it compared to Kubrick's Clockwork Orange: the music - Purcell's Canzona from the Queen Mary Funeral Music - and the psychiatric hospital setting nudge us to recognize the similarities. Yet the script's icy narrative owes more I think to Kind Hearts and Coronets. Whereas that film kept the reality of death at arm's length for obvious comedic purposes, the Young Poisoner seems to wish to rub our noses in the horrors of dying from obnoxious chemicals. Though we are prepared to hate the Stepmother, her slow death from repeated doses of Thallium mimics cancer and she is allowed to know that he is poisoning her but lacks the ability to communicate it. It raises the question of quite what kind of comedy this thinks it is. Made as a English-German co-production, it appears to have been originally 105 minutes. I think there is something missing in the middle, where the boy undergoes an unexplained decline in health during his imprisonment. An odd and slightly poisonous flower, one is left with the impression that the psychopathic tendencies of the central character are being viewed as giving society a touch of its own medicine. Even the sympathy of the psychiatrist is viewed as a mixture of professional vanity and emotional perversity. At the heart of the movie - if it has one - there seems to be an old alchemical conceit, projecting the contents of the psyche into the crucible on the hearth. At a critical point it explodes.
Jam is post-explosion. Another comedy that goes so black you can't see any jokes. Many will push it away as something utterly sick and will not recognize the mirror it is holding up to a self-obsessed age. Here a sexually-perverted house-seller lowers his asking-price for sexual favours from a couple. Raising the price at the last moment brings him extra sessions with the husband's handicapped sister. Bad taste gags include an accupuncturist who crucifies people to tables with nine-inch nails and a couple who greet the sexual kidnapping and murder of their son as a minor nuisance. There were only six, all equally short. I know just four of them and this is actually one of the less extreme episodes.
Friday, 20th October, am
171.V: M. Haneke: Funny Games, 1997, 104'18" + 3' intro.
Friday, 20th October, pm
007.D: D. Fincher: Se7en, Commentary 3: Picture, 1995 etc, 121'33"
Saturday, 21st October, pm into Sunday, 22nd October, am
157.V: Fellini: 8 1/2, 1963, full screen version from Channel 5 broadcast, 09.05.19991995, 132'19"
Sunday, 22nd October, am
047.D: The Making of Hitchock's Torn Curtain, Documentary, 2000, 32'23"
Sunday, 22nd October, pm
303.D: 3 Almodóvar Trailers, Talk to Her: 1'26"All About My Mother: 1'39" Live Flesh: 1'32"
296.D: Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Introductions, Collection, Nos.21 to 66, 1963 - 66, 79'03"
Monday, 23rd October, am
257.D: Chaplin in The Bank, 1915, 14'33"
067.D: W. Wellman: Nothing Sacred, 1937, 73'45"
Thursday, 26th October, am
199.V: P. Joyce: Hell on Earth, Documentary with lost footage from Ken Russell's The Devils, 2002, from Channel Four broadcast, November 2002, 50'26"
Tuesday, 31st October, am
257.D: Chaplin in Shanghaied, 1915, 17'18"
260.D: Ghosthunters, 3 Episodes from the 1996 tv series: Echoes From Beyond the Grave, 23'30" The Possession, 23'34" & Priest & Professor, 23'54"