CHARLIE CHAN AT THE OPERA (1936)

At the Rockland State Sanitarium, an amnesiac who has been there for seven years spends his evenings playing the piano and singing arias. One night, he sees a newspaper story announcing the return of opera diva Lilli Rochelle to Los Angeles after many years away and that triggers a response: the man remembers that he was the celebrated opera singer Gravelle who was assumed to have burned to death years ago in an opera house fire. He suspects that Lilli, who was his wife, conspired with her lover, the singer Enrico Barelli, to make sure he died in the fire, and his only thought now is to get revenge as both Lilli and Barelli are in town performing the opera Carnival, with Barelli singing the part of Mephisto, for which Gravelle was known. (This backstory is revealed in bits and pieces throughout the movie.) Complicating the situation: the arrival of Lilli's young unacknowledged daughter Kitty, from her marriage to Gravelle, who is seeking to get her mother's permission to marry the handsome Phil Childers—more backstory doled out over time. Gravelle knocks out Barelli and takes his place on stage for his big aria, at the end of which, his character stabs Lilli's character as the curtain falls. After the opera, when Lilli is found dead in her dressing room, as is Barelli in his, Gravelle, now in hiding in the theater, is the chief suspect. But could it be someone else? Like Whitely, Lilli's husband who knew that she was carrying on with Barelli?; or Anita, Barelli’s wife, who knew Gravelle was present in the theater?; maybe Phil, tired of waiting for Lilli's permission to marry Kitty? Or maybe it was Gravelle all along. Charlie Chan and his son Lee help Inspector Regan solve the case.

This is an interesting entry in the Chan series. For starters, Warner Oland has a co-star who gets equal billing: Boris Karloff, who plays Gravelle (pictured above left). In fact, the film's onscreen title card reads "Warner Oland vs. Boris Karloff." Partly due to the writing of the character and partly due to his own performance, Karloff is the first Chan supporting player who outshines him. You'll notice I barely mentioned Chan in the summary; although he is present throughout the whole film, and seems to have as much dialogue as in any other Chan movie, he almost fades into the background, between Karloff and the complex backstory which gets related during the first two-thirds of the film—though Oland holds his own in the few scenes he shares with Karloff. Keye Luke, as Lee, gets to spend some time in opera company costume as he helps his dad gather evidence. Karloff goes a bit over the top, but it's fully justified, seeing as he’s playing an opera singer who has spent years in an asylum. Old reliable Thomas Beck (at right) turns up in his fourth and final Chan movie as Phil, and his fiancée is played by Charlotte Henry, best known as Alice in the all-star 1933 ALICE IN WONDERLAND. William Demarest is the racist jerk of a cop who keeps mocking Chan to his face; he winds up with grudging respect for Chan but doesn't really get the comeuppance he deserves. B-talent fills out the rest of the cast: Margaret Irving makes for a bland Lilli, and Gregory Gaye (Barelli) and Frank Conroy (Whitely) don't get much to do aside from act suspicious. Guy Usher is effective enough as the inspector. The writing is about average, with some plotholes here and there; like, why are Lilli and Barelli still sneaking around together after seven years? It has an almost real-time setting, with most of the action set during and right after the performance of the opera. Oscar Levant wrote the music for the opera. Nice in-joke: the stage manager insists, "This opera's going on tonight even if Frankenstein walks in!" [DVD]

JUNGLE HELL (1956/1958)

In an Indian jungle village, people have been suffering from caustic burns after handling some shiny rocks that were dug up nearby. One of those rocks has been placed on a small stone shrine by Shan-Kar, the village high priest, and declared holy. A native child seems to be hovering near death while being treated by the priest. Sabu, the designated Jungle Boy of the tribe (which is an honor, even though his only duty seems to be guiding hunters through the jungle), takes the boy to Dr. Morrison who treats him for radiation burns. Morrison's boss in London sends Dr. Pamela Ames to the jungle to investigate and it turns out the "burning rocks" are bits of uranium, dug up inadvertently as trees are being felled to provide wood for a new stockade. An elephant hunter named Trosk arrives and rival Jungle Boy Kumar is sent to travel with him, angering Sabu and leading to some fisticuffs when Sabu finds out that Kumar has been stealing from Trosk. Trosk decides that he wants to take some of the uranium but he winds up dead in a tiger attack. Morrison half-heartedly proposes to Pamela and that's pretty much it.

After I watched SABU AND THE MAGIC RING, this came up as a YouTube suggestion. It wound up being a rather miserable movie watching experience. I don’t think it's an exaggeration to say that almost 40% of the movie is stock footage of elephants and other jungle animals and landscapes. Two of the animal attack scenes involve an actor wrestling a large stuffed plush animal. The narrative peters out anti-climactically. The backstory to the film is more interesting than the film. In 1956, an hour-long pilot episode was made for a jungle adventure TV show starring Indian actor Sabu who, after having had a decent career as a juvenile actor in the 40s, needed a comeback. The pilot didn’t sell (nor did the pilot that became MAGIC RING), but in 1958, it was padded out with stock footage to some 80 minutes and released in the States as a second feature. A year or two later, it was reworked further and released as Jungle Boy, with the added plotpoint of UFOs revealed to be behind the presence of the burning rocks.  This is the non-UFO version I watched (and oddly, it has a 1964 copyright date), but it was so bad, I don't want to track down the other film; one would think that the sci-fi element would make it better but online critics say that's not so. Poor Sabu, over 30 at the time, is the best thing about this. He is still youthful and energetic and gives his all to his performance. The other leads are sluggish and unconvincing: David Bruce is Morrison, the ostensible hero who never gets a chance to be heroic; K.T. Stevens is the colorless Pamela. George E. Stone, a familiar and likable character actor best known as The Runt in the Boston Blackie mysteries, is OK but has little to do. Sabu's real son is the little boy in the beginning, and even he's a disappointment, never acting like he's in any discomfort despite his radiation burns. For no reason, there’s a plane crash and footage of an elephant giving birth, and did I mention the mostly irrelevant stock footage that pads out the movie? IMDb gives 1956 as the United States release year, but using the Newspapers.com website, I could find no reference to it playing in theaters until 1958, though a few 1956 articles mention that Sabu was filming a TV pilot. The only point of interest I could find was that characters use the currently trendy greeting "Namaste." Do not bother. [YouTube]

CHANCES (1931)

On a foggy London night in 1914, soldiers Jack Ingleside (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) and his brother Tom (Anthony Bushell) are catching a train to visit their mother while on furlough. Jack flirts with a young woman who laughingly puts him off but says she's sure they will meet again. The next day at the family mansion, Jack does see her; she's Molly Prescott (Rose Hobart), a childhood friend now all grown up. Jack doesn't remember her, but Tom does as he nursed a crush on her all these years. Jack flirts with Molly at the seaside, saying that Tom "doesn’t care a thing about girls," and they share a passionate kiss. When Mom tells Jack about Tom's unspoken feelings for Molly, Jack decides to give her up and begins openly courting a visiting girl, irritating Molly and leaving an opening for Tom to move in. When the brothers are called up for combat duty in France, Molly reluctantly tells Tom she will wait for him. On the battlefield, Tom pines away for Molly, but while on a short leave in Calais, Jack runs into Molly; they have sex on a beach and she gives him a small picture of her with a loving inscription. Back on the front, Tom sees the picture and thinks it's meant for him. When Jack tells him the truth, Tom is angry, feeling "chucked" by both of them. During a major battle, the two brothers reconcile, but ultimately only one will survive to return to Molly. This is a thoroughly average and fairly predictable wartime romantic melodrama, enlivened by good performances by the leads. Fairbanks comes off as casually likeable, and Bushell as sweet and a bit naive. Neither character comes off as completely at fault or as faultless in the situation. As is the Hollywood way in movies with two male friends butting heads over a woman, the focus is more on the men than the woman. Hence, Hobart's character is slightly underwritten but she's fine in the role. Mary Forbes is her usual reliable self as the mother. At the time, the country house set was the largest single set ever built at First National (which was part of Warner Bros.) though it doesn't draw a lot of attention to itself. The last battle scene is very well done. Overall, even if it's not a standout, I'd say it exceeded my expectations. Pictured are Bushell and Fairbanks. [TCM] 

Two INNER SANCTUM mysteries: THE FROZEN GHOST and PILLOW OF DEATH

The last two of the six Inner Sanctum movies made by Universal in the mid 1940s. THE FROZEN GHOST (1945) concerns mentalist and hypnotist Gregor the Great. At a performance one night, a drunken heckler causes trouble. Gregor puts him into a trance, whispers to himself, "I could kill him," and the man drops dead. The police clear him, saying the man was an alcoholic with a weak heart, but Gregor, haunted by guilt, breaks his engagement with his stage assistant Maura and quits his profession. His manager George gets him a job as a lecturer at Madame Monet's wax museum. Monet and her niece Nina like Gregor's company which irritates Rudi, their rather tightly wound wax sculptor, formerly a disgraced plastic surgeon, who is jealous of their attentions to Gregor. Sparks fly when Maura returns and Rudi accuses Gregor of trying to romance the young Nina. Monet goes missing; Rudi has placed her in suspended animation and hidden her away, apparently planning on turning her into a wax statue, and he plans to do the same thing with Nina. Discussing the story further would necessitate spoilers, and even though this isn't a great movie, the big plot twist is a good one. As with the other films, Lon Chaney (Gregor) is the weak link. We just don't see what it is that this lumpy lug has that would lead him to be attractive to all the female characters. But everyone else is good. Milburn Stone is George, his sympathetic manager; Evelyn Ankers (Maura) is a familiar B-movie face; Douglas Dumbrille plays a slyly eccentric police inspector. Best of all is Martin Kosleck, a specialist in playing slimy characters, as Rudi—he is convincing as a psycho and is the main reason for watching this. BTW, there is no ghost; the title comes from a reference to "freezing" both Monet and Nina. Pictured at left is Kosleck with a statue of Attila the Hun. [DVD]

In PILLOW OF DEATH (1945), young Donna Kincaid is running around with her boss, lawyer Wayne Fletcher, and Donna's Aunt Belle, a spinster whom Donna lives with, isn't happy, mostly because Wayne is married, though supposedly planning on getting a divorce. When Wayne's wife Vivian is murdered (by suffocation, hence the silly movie title), the police (and Aunt Belle) initially suspect Wayne, but Belle isn't happy when Capt. McCracken lets Wayne go for lack of physical evidence. We meet other characters: Sam, Belle's brother who plays up rumors that their house is haunted; a medium named Julian who claims he predicted Vivian's death; Belle's cousin Amelia who is a great believer in Julian; Bruce, a nosy neighbor who has a thing for Donna. There is a seance, and Wayne starts hearing his wife's voice calling to him from her tomb. This one of the best of the Inner Sanctum movies. It's basically a nicely atmospheric old dark house movie which holds out the possibility that there are supernatural goings-on. Chaney is a load of anti-charisma but he's a bit more effective here than in some of the other outings, being sympathetic while holding out the possibility that he might not be after all. Again, a good supporting cast is welcome. Brenda Joyce is OK as Donna, but better are Clara Blandick (Belle), Rosalind Ivan (Amelia), and J. Edward Bromberg as the medium. This last film in the series will keep you guessing to the end as to who is behind what. Don’t let that silly title keep you away. Pictured at right are Bromberg and Blandick. [DVD]

Two INNER SANCTUM mysteries: WEIRD WOMAN and DEAD MAN'S EYES

Back in the early days of this blog, I reviewed two of Universal’s Inner Sanctum movies, B-mysteries with mild elements of horror or the supernatural, all an hour long and all starring Lon Chaney Jr. in the lead, sometimes as a good guy, sometimes not. Designed for double feature bills, they come off today like episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Show. Most of them begin with a pre-credit scene of a distorted and disembodied head in a crystal ball (at left), defining the "inner sanctum" as the human brain, "a mass of living, pulsating flesh" which can cause a person to perform dark deeds like murder. For B-movies, their production values are good in terms of sets, cinematography, and supporting actors. But they all share two flaws: 1) weak writing that sometimes tries to either cram too much material into an hour, or to stretch out too little material; 2) the performances of Lon Chaney. Though Chaney is considered one of the big names of classic-era horror, he was actually rarely very good. In most of his roles, even in his best-known role, that of THE WOLF MAN, he comes off as oafish, artificial, and dull. His name had some box office clout and he appeared in almost 200 movies in his lifetime, mostly B- or sub-B productions. Of the films I've seen, only two feature solid performances: OF MICE AND MEN, early in his career, and SPIDER BABY, late in his career. For me, he's the biggest problem with the Inner Sanctum movies. His characters are usually supposed to be sophisticated, intelligent, and handsome or charismatic, but Chaney comes off as none of those things. Attempts at seeming vulnerable come off as self--pity. When he has voice-over narration, he delivers it in a strained whisper. So no matter how good the rest of the movie is, Chaney is a big lumbering hole right smack in the middle of the movie. Nevertheless, these movies are watchable, and sometimes rise above Chaney's presence to be pretty good.

Of all six of the films, WEIRD WOMAN (1944) is the best. It's based on the Fritz Lieber novel Conjure Wife, which was later made into a true horror classic in 1962 as BURN, WITCH, BURN. Chaney is Norman Reed, an anthropologist in the South Seas doing research for his book Superstition vs. Reason and Fact. Embedded with a native tribe, he meets Paula, daughter of a late scientist who lived with the tribe. They fall in love, get married, and settle in Reed's college town where, due to her continued beliefs in magic and voodoo, she is slow to assimilate with the other women of the college. Paula works magic to protect her husband, and indeed, when he is put forward as department head, he has a rival in the older Prof. Sawtelle who has seniority and his own book coming out, and whose wife Evelyn resents Reed's quick success. Other threats come from Reed's former love Ilona, Maggie, a grad student with a crush on Reed, and David, Maggie's frustrated boyfriend. When Reed forces his wife to destroy all her voodoo paraphernalia, bad things start happening. Sawtelle, convinced that Chaney is about to expose him as a plagiarist, kills himself, causing Evelyn to plot revenge. Maggie throws herself at Reed and when he rejects her, she files an assault complaint against him, which causes David to threaten Reed with a gun. When everything falls apart, Reed must work to figure out who is intent on destroying his life. Chaney fails to be convincing as an academic, though in the last half of the movie, he comes off better as a confused and angry man trying to keep his head above water. Anne Gwynne is a bit too bubbly to be the witchy wife. But everyone else is quite good: Evelyn Ankers as the manipulative ex, Lois Collier as the young innocent, and Phil Brown (later to play Uncle Owen in STAR WARS) as the jealous student. Best of all is Elizabeth Russell as Evelyn, the angry wife who is instrumental in both Chaney's downfall and in his eventual redemption. She has striking looks and a strong presence, and though given low billing in the credits, she has an important role and a fair amount of screen time. If you just watch one movie in this series, this is probably the one to see. Pictured at right are Collier and Brown. [DVD]

DEAD MAN’S EYES (1944) features Chaney (at left) in another role he can't quite handle, that of Dave Stuart, a talented painter. His bulk and his schlubby appearance make him look like a janitor who just happened to pick up a brush. Though he has a fiancée, Heather, daughter of the wealthy 'Dad' Hayden, his current model, the exotic looking Tanya (Acquanetta) wants him as well. Also hanging around are Nick, Heather's former boyfriend, and Alan, a psychiatrist and close friend of Dave's. One day Tanya accidentally switches Dave's bottle of eyewash with a bottle of acetic acid, and when Dave goes to clean his tired eyes after a day of painting, he uses the acid and blinds himself. A cornea transplant is possible, and Dad volunteers to donate his eyes when he dies. But with Dad still healthy, Dave breaks off his engagement with Heather, giving Tanya new hope. Then Dad is found dead and Dave is the prime suspect. Despite his arrest, the cornea transplant goes ahead. Will it be successful? Will Heather go back to Dave? And who killed Dad? Here, I noticed that Chaney goes from zero to sixty in his melodramatic outbursts; one minute, he's fairly mild, then suddenly he's growling shrilly and acting dangerous. Acquanetta gives one of the worst performances I've ever seen in a professional Hollywood movie. Yes, Tanya is supposed to be exotically foreign, but in every scene, she fails to come off as mysterious or jealous or crazy because the actress just stares straight ahead and stumbles through her lines. At one point, a cop sees Dave's painting of Tanya and says he's captured her "warmth and passion," two attributes that Acquanetta can't bring to the role. Jean Parker (Heather), Paul Kelly (Alan), George Meeker (Nick) and Thomas Gomez (a cop) are all satisfactory. The hour drags by with another murder and a predictable conclusion. You can skip this one. I’ll review the last two tomorrow. [DVD]

HALF WAY TO SHANGHAI (1942)

Two men in a truck, George Zucco and Lionel Royce, go crashing through a roadway checkpoint in order to board a train to Rangoon. When an official asks Zucco what he does for a living, he replies, "I’m a German spy" and they all laugh—but he is a German spy who is looking for a rogue spy (Charles Wagenheim) who is carrying a map of China's main munitions dumps which could be used by the Japanese in their war against China. The rogue spy Peale intends to sell the map to the highest bidder, but Zucco and Royce plan to take it for free. Also on the train: Kent Taylor, an engineer who worked on construction of the Burma Road; Irene Hervey, an ex-flame of Taylor's who is on her way to an arranged marriage with a rich man she's never met; Charlotte Wynters, a famous female pilot turned reporter with pro-Nazi sympathies; Fay Helm, her assistant who may not feel the same way about Nazis; and Henry Stephenson, a retired British officer. Wagenheim, realizing that Zucco is after him, hides in Taylor's compartment and winds up knocking Taylor out before Zucco enters and demands the map. But Wagenheim has hidden the map somewhere on the train and Zucco kills him and tries to frame Taylor, though a detective (J. Edward Bromberg) doesn't buy it. The map has wound up in Wynters' briefcase and she joins forces with Zucco, buying the silence of Helm who knows about the map. The climax occurs in a blackout and with a well-staged escape attempt on top of the train. This spy thriller deserves to be better known than it is. The one-hour running time and physical production mark it as a B-movie second feature, but the screenplay is solid and the acting quite good. Busy B-lead Kent Taylor is fine as a second string hero and Zucco, as usual, is a formidable villain. Bromberg and Wagenheim are standouts, and Mary Gordon is good as the mild-mannered wife of a doctor, but Charlotte Wynters is a bit wooden as the pilot. Willie Fung has a short scene as a Chinese peasant who is reading a Flash Gordon book. There are enough side plots and characters so that the film moves along nicely. As a fan of train thrillers, I quite enjoyed this. Pictured is Kent Taylor. [YouTube]

INVISIBLE AVENGER (1958)

The Shadow, aka Lamont Cranston, is a vague construct of a hero, sometimes a vigilante crimefighter, sometimes a detective. He is best encountered in the pages of the pulp magazines, radio shows and paperbacks that made him popular. There, he was a figure of mystery who could cloud men's minds, turn invisible, and creep people out with an eerie cackling laugh. For some reason, however, the Shadow has never been well exploited on the movie screen, with the possible exception of the 1994 film with Alec Baldwin, and I think it's because most of the silver screen Shadows don't have supernatural powers. In the Monogram film series from the mid-1940s and the 1940 Columbia serial, he's basically a Batman figure, a wealthy man who helps the police solve crimes. This hour-long cheapie gives him some powers but is otherwise drab and undistinguished. I suppose it's not fair to critique this as a feature film because it’s actually a two-part TV pilot that was never picked up. There's a reason that 1950s TV shows (except for I Love Lucy) have not remained in the pop culture eye: compared with recent shows, or even shows of the 70s and 80s, the 50s shows seem as primitive as silent movies do to current film fans. The sets here look like they could be knocked down by a mild breeze, the acting is quite bad, and the scene setups are downright claustrophobic, despite this being partly directed by the great cinematographer James Wong Howe. Still, I've gotten this far after having sat through the entire hour so I might as well forge ahead.

We get a shot of a New Orleans alley at night as a voice intones the famous radio show opening: "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows…" Pablo Ramirez is in exile, with his daughter Felicia, from his homeland Santa Cruz where his presidency was disrupted by a military coup led by the Generalissimo. Tara and Rocco own (or just hang out at, I was unclear) a jazz club called the Famous Door, but they are actually spies for the Generalissimo. Pablo gets jazz trumpeter Tony to contact his friend Lamont Cranston in New York to contact his friend The Shadow to help Pablo and Felicia. Tony calls Cranston but he is shot dead before he can finish his message. Nevertheless, Cranston and his mystic mentor Jogendra head to New Orleans. The Generalissimo executes Pablo's twin brother Victor, live on TV, in an effort to draw Pablo out, which it does. I lost track of the various comings and goings in the last fifteen minutes, but there is a nice plot twist near the end, and Cranston does help Pablo get the counter-revolution going. Richard Derr (pictured at left) makes for a sadly bland Cranston—he's not mysterious looking, not good looking, not inspiring in any way. Most of the other actors seem like amateurs, with the exception being Steve Dano who plays Tony, pictured at right. Sadly, he's killed off early on (this is also his only credited acting role). Otherwise, people either overact (Helen Westcott as Tara) or barely act at all (Dan Mullin as Pablo). Supposedly this was filmed on location but it sure looks like a bunch of cheap studio sets to me. The jazz music is OK. The invisibility effects are pretty good—Cranston, always shown in street clothes rather than as the slouch-hatted, semi-masked figure of the pulps,  vanishes completely with his shadow remaining or turns into a smudgy image, which is creepily effective. Dialogue is listless, with one memorable line from Pablo on why he must show himself again in Santa Cruz: "Courage will seep out of the people like wine from a broken bottle." That might be a good line poorly executed or a bad line well executed, but it stands out. The existence of the mentor Jogendra, who can telepathically communicate with Cranston, gave this a vague Doctor Strange feel. I can't recommend this to anyone except Shadow completists. [YouTube]

THE BIBLE IN THE BEGINNING (1966)

In the 1960s, Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis decided to make a series of movies based directly on the books of the Bible. This film, based roughly on the first half of the book of Genesis, is the only one that got made. It had a big budget, a talented director (John Huston), a number of stars, a literate and reverent screenplay (by playwright Christopher Fry), and the marketing power of a big studio (20th Century Fox). It actually was a hit, becoming the highest-grossing movie of the year in the U.S., but like Fox's earlier CLEOPATRA, the budget was so big that it didn't quite break even. It was not critically well received and its reputation has suffered ever since, and it hasn't entered the canon of religious movies that get seen on TV every year during the Easter season. What's the problem? Well, it's long, almost three hours, and after a promising opening featuring Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel, the bulk of the narrative covers just two stories: Noah's Ark and the life of Abraham, called by God to more or less be the founding father of the Jews. There is a brief segment about Nimrod and the Tower of Babel, but it feels uneasily shoehorned in and adds very little to the overarching story. Though the money is up there on the screen—great sets, good cinematography, and probably the best cinematic depiction of the Noah story you'll ever see—it's almost too reverent, feeling at times like a string of Bible illustrations come to life (especially true of the Creation segment). There is little excitement or energy—John Huston's narration is bland—and to some degree, it becomes a waiting game to see who the next stars (in major parts or cameos) will be. 

It takes almost half an hour to get from the Creation (clouds, lava, blurry colors) to the expulsion of Adam and Eve, both seen naked with their naughty bits strategically covered, from the Garden of Eden. The shepherd Abel is obedient, but the farmer Cain is shown taking back for himself some of the grain meant to be burned in sacrifice to God, and God's not happy. Cain kills Abel and is doomed to be a roaming fugitive, with a literal black mark on his forehead. Years pass; God is not happy with mankind's behavior and so destroys the world with a flood, saving only Noah, whom he commands to build an ark to save his family and, as we all know, two of each animal species on Earth. This is by far the most spectacular part of the film; the ark sets are huge and the parade of animals (all real with no animatronics or CGI) is impressive. But it's also here that we realize that the storytelling is fairly inert. We know this story and nothing new is added; though John Huston is fine as Noah, neither he nor any member of his family is fleshed out to any degree. After the short Tower of Babel scene, the rest of the movie (the last 90 minutes) is taken up with Abraham and Sarah. This lapsed Catholic boy was relatively unfamiliar with their story except for the broad outlines—Sarah giving birth late in life, God asking Abraham to sacrifice their child—so I was interested in following the plot thread. Included are the stories of Hagar the handmaid, Lot leaving Abraham to eventually establish a new tribe, the fate of the sinful cities of Sodom and Gomorrah (with Lot's wife turning into a pillar of salt being an especially good effect), the birth of Isaac, and the demand of sacrifice. 

George C. Scott somewhat surprisingly underplays Abraham rather effectively, but Ava Gardner (as Sarah) suffers the same fate of most of the other actors here—she doesn't get to create a character as much as enact the outlines of one, one that most viewers will already be familiar with. Richard Harris gives an eccentric performance as Cain, leaping about like a dancer, but otherwise actors like Peter O'Toole, Stephen Boyd, Franco Nero, Michael Parks and Gabriele Ferzetti are wasted; they're not bad but they're not called up to do anything special. There is a bit of tarted-up campiness in the Sodom scene, but we're led to believe that Sodom is just generally decadent. My overall verdict: some very well done individual moments here and there, but rather dull in overall affect. Most viewers would probably not choose to watch it again which is maybe why it's not run more often. As far as the title of this movie goes, the onscreen title card reads The Bible in the Beginning ..., but the posters and many critics call it The Bible ... In the Beginning. I got rid of the ellipses altogether which aren't really needed at all. Pictured at top left, Michael Parks as Adam; at right, Ferzetti as Lot and O'Toole as an angel. [Amazon Streaming]

PROJECT MOON BASE (1953)

In 1970, a trip directly from the earth to the moon is considered too dangerous for humans, but a three-person crew is about to take off from an orbiting space station on an exploratory lunar trip, taking close up photographs of the lunar surface to study the feasibility of setting up a moon base. The space agency is on guard for sabotage that might be carried out by, as a title card puts it, "the enemies of Freedom" (i.e., Russians). As it turns out, such enemies are planning such sabotage by kidnapping one of the crew members, a Dr. Wernher, and replacing him with an exact lookalike whose mission is to take control of the lunar ship and ram the space station, destroying it. Meanwhile, there is tension brewing as Gen. 'Pappy' Greene is pressured to replace the chief pilot, Major Moore, with Col. Briteis, a female. This decision doesn't sit well with either Pappy or Moore, who is bumped down to co-pilot. They may be chauvinists, but as it happens, Briteis (pronounced "bright eyes" by everyone) acts a bit like Gidget, full of teenage spunk, constantly pouting and whining. At one point, Pappy scolds her, telling her she's too big for her britches, and that she's a spoiled brat who needs a spanking. The ship takes off and Wernher tries to wrest control from Briteis but is overpowered by Moore. But the saboteur's actions cause them to waste fuel and they have to make an emergency landing on the moon. When communications with the space station fail, Moore and the chastened Wernher leave the ship to set up a radio relay on the moon's surface. Wernher falls from a moon cliff and dies, and Pappy lets Briteis and Moore know that emergency supplies will be dropped off soon and they are now the first official lunar residents. Of course, for the sake of PR, they really should be married, so the President (also a woman) performs a ceremony from Earth, and Moore and Briteis become a happy couple, ready to anchor the coming moon base.

In a happy coincidence, the Artemis II was heading for lunar orbit as I watched this so this seems like a timely review. One makes allowances for early 50s sci-fi space movies as the genre was relatively new, but even so, this has not aged well. Apparently shot in ten days, it was originally intended as a pilot for a TV series (the teleplay was by sci-fi pro Robert Heinlein) but those plans were canceled and some new footage was shot to pad it out to a bit over an hour. The sets generally look cheap though some effects are nicely done; there are shots of people on the space station walking on the ceiling and sitting on chairs on the walls, which of course brings to mind Kubrick's 2001 (pictured at right). Scenes on the moon look fairly realistic. Even the space station, the first one shown in a movie, looks good. Aside from the blatant sexism in the portrayal of Briteis and the reactions of the men to her, the most bizarre thing here is the wardrobe. The crew wear snug t-shirts, little skullcaps, and the unsexiest shortie shorts you've ever seen—though interestingly, they do get the spacesuits right for the external action. The acting is strictly TV level; in fact, one of the better performances comes from Hayden Rorke, best known as Dr. Bellows in I Dream of Jeannie. Donna Martell (Briteis) is saddled with a terribly written character and she becomes the potential feminist icon you love to hate. Ross Ford (Moore) has little to do and, sadly, doesn't look all that appealing in his tight tees (though Martell does). The only humor here is used to poke fun at the female colonel, though one of the last lines, when Moore, seeing  that needed supplies have finally landed, says, "Briteis, it’s Christmas!" But the worst thing in the movie is the short appearance of a character named Polly Prattles, an obnoxious reporter who comes off more like a gossip columnist. Only recommended for sci-fi buffs interested in the genre's history. Posters for the film call it Project Moonbase, but the film itself uses Moon Base as two words. At top left are Ross and Martell. [YouTube]

ORPHEUS (1950)

The poet Orpheus is at a poet's café in Paris, feeling ignored by the newer, hipper poets (I'm tempted to call them "beatniks" though that concept didn't exist in 1950) because he's too commercial. The hot young poet Cégeste shows up drunk and stumbling on the arms of a woman known only as the Princess. He gets into a brawl and is hit by two motorcyclists in black leather. Her chauffeur Heurtebise puts him in the back seat of her car to take him to the hospital and she asks Orpheus to come along as a witness. During the trip, the view of the landscape turns to a photographic negative and we hear odd radio transmissions ("Silence goes backward faster"; "The bird sings with its fingers") that Orpheus comes to think are beautiful if very obscure poems. Orpheus discovers that Cégeste is dead and they head to the Princess' isolated home where Cégeste is laid out on a bed. The Princess waves her hand in the air and he comes back to life. With Orpheus watching, the Princess, Cégeste, and the two motorcyclists walk through a full-length mirror into what we find out is the underworld. The Princess is death personified. Orpheus cannot follow and the next time we see him, he wakes up in a quarry with Heurtebise standing near the car. The chauffeur has been instructed to take Orpheus back to his wife Eurydice and stay with him. Though Eurydice has been worried by his absence, she also seems disturbed by his return as her friends in the League for Women don't approve of Orpheus, and he refuses to explain his absence. She is also, we discover, pregnant. Soon, Eurydice is struck and killed by the black leather motorcyclists. Heurtebise offers to take Orpheus through the mirror underworld, but he must decide who he is in love with: Eurydice or Death.

This beautiful but often obscure film is a recasting of the Orpheus myth, in which Orpheus is allowed to go to the Underworld to bring back his dead wife Eurydice under the condition that, on their trip back, he doesn’t turn around and look at her. He does. She goes back to the land of death and he is literally torn apart by female followers of Dionysus during an orgy. This version dispenses with the finale, and indeed gives Orpheus and Eurydice a happy ending, with a less happy one for the Princess of Death. I've seen this film a few times over the years, and it's best not to read it as an exact replica of the myth, but as a dreamy fantasy that pulls elements from the myth to create a whole new narrative. It remains a movie full of ambiguity and mystery, and those elements will stymie some viewers. Roger Ebert called it that rare film that is made for "purely artistic reasons," and if you can leave yourself open to letting the visuals and the moods wash over you and let yourself think about it rather than interpret it, you might enjoy the experience. Jean Cocteau wrote and directed, and used some amazing special effects that, while perhaps seeming primitive today, are still effective: reverse motion, slow motion, film cuts, obvious rear projection. The utterly bizarre trips to and from the underworld are indeed quite otherworldly, and all of today's CGI probably could not achieve such an effective evocation of mood. The nonsense radio messages, Cocteau said, were inspired by resistance messages sent over the radio in WWII, an explanation that does not erase the effectiveness of the strange transmissions. In what is truly an art film, the acting is not the most important element, but the actors are mostly fine. I find Jean Marais as Orpheus (above left), the weak link in the cast, giving a surface performance as though he was just following the director's instructions. But Maria Caseres (Death) and Francois Périer (Heurtebise) bring some emotional depth to their mostly symbolic roles; Maria Dea is fine as Eurydice—not an especially sympathetic character—and Edouard Dermithe makes an impression in his limited role as Cégeste. I rarely felt emotionally engaged with the characters, but the visuals and the atmosphere and the odd stylistic touches (on screen and in script) make this worth watching as perhaps the archetypal art film of the 1950s. Pictured at right are Périer and Marais. [TCM]