A SEPARATE PEACE (1972)

In 1942, with World War II under way, Gene and Finny are roommates at Devon, a prep school in New England. Gene is a serious student who studies hard and gets A’s; Finney, a handsome and outgoing golden boy, is a jock who barely studies and is happy getting by with C’s. The boys have a loose knit circle of friends who include the snooty Brinker, amusing but irritating, and the awkward outcast Leper whom Finny stands up for. They jokingly refer to themselves as a secret society, though their main activities seem to be playing lacrosse and swimming in a nearby river. One day, Finny climbs up a tall tree and challenges others to climb up with him and dive into the river. Only Gene joins him, an act which cements their friendship. Later, Finney admits that Gene is his best pal, though for his part, Gene seems to both worship Finney and resent his influence. Even when he needs to study, Gene always ends up acceding to Finny's wishes to goof off. The next time the two are at the tree, Finny dares him to climb the tree to do a double jump. Just as they're about to go, Finny falls out of the tree, breaking his leg. It's unclear what happened: did Finny just stumble or did Gene shake the tree branch, causing his fall? Recovering from the break keeps Finny out of school for several weeks, and when Gene visits him, he haltingly admits that he shook the branch, though good-natured Finny doesn't accept the confession. When Finny returns to Devon, the two reconcile and, though his jock days are behind him, Finny coaches Gene for the 1944 Olympics (which Gene suspects and we know will be called off due to the war). But Brinker, suspecting that Gene caused Finny's accident, convenes a midnight kangaroo court to get at the truth. Refusing to accept Gene's guilt, Finny goes stumbling out of the room, falls down some stairs, and breaks his leg again. Though the doctor is sure a routine operation will fix his leg, something goes wrong and Finny dies under the knife. Decades later, Gene visits the school and goes to the tree, the memory of Finny having never left him.

In the 1970s and 80s, the novel by John Knowles that this is based on was a canonical high school reading assignment. This gay boy read it at the age of 16 (not for a class) and found it to be a story, in large part, of homoerotic attraction: Gene can't face up to his feelings, and finds them in conflict with his resentment over how easy life seems for Finny with his looks and charm; Finny is blissfully unaware of any feelings that run deeper than friendship. But the book is more often approached as a coming-of-age story about accepting responsibility, building an identity, and preparing to become part of the wider world outside of school. The war is brought up frequently. The boys know that the draft waits for them after graduation, though for a time Finny clings to a belief that it's a fake war blown out of proportion by the government. After his accident, he becomes upset that he will not be eligible to fight. Leper leaves Devon before graduation to join the Army, but returns AWOL, plagued by mental problems that he thinks will lead to a discharge. Knowles has denied that he intended any queer reading of the story, and the book is usually taught with a focus on Gene's envy rather than any sexual attraction, conscious or otherwise. With all due respect to Knowles, I say, trust the tale, not the teller. Inchoate sexual feelings certainly play a part in the development of Gene and Finny's relationship, and the movie, filled with scenes of energetic shirtless boys and long lingering glances between Gene and Finny, seems to endorse such an interpretation. 

The movie is quite faithful to the book, but it's not an especially good movie. The director, Larry Peerce, wanted and got a mostly non-professional cast. This is the first movie role for Parker Stevenson (Gene) who went on to a long acting career. For my taste, his performance is awfully one-note, his face usually looking either confused or thoughtful, and I fail to see what about Gene caused Finny to gravitate toward him as a close friend. John Heyl (at right), who had been an actual student at the prep school where the movie was filmed, is quite good as Finny, partly because the character is more about surface charm than buried emotions. He's also got preppy good looks to burn, though in real life he turned away from acting and became a teacher. The biggest problem with the acting is that everyone except Stevenson says their lines too quickly with little variation in tone, a problem that should have been addressed by the director. Visually, it's lovely: the tree, the river, the school grounds, and the snow scenes in the last half of the movie all add atmosphere that the acting and script sometimes lack. Period detail is not especially strong. I would say that reading the book then seeing the movie is the best way to experience the story. This is not available on a region 1 DVD and the print I watched on Prime is squished a bit to fit a square screen which was really disappointing. Pictured at top left are Stevenson and Heyl. [Amazon Prime]

STRANDED (1965)

In Greece near some ruins, Jeff breaks up with Raina, telling her that in following her, he is no longer a man. After he leaves, she goes to a beach with her small dog and walks into the ocean in an apparent suicide attempt (all I could think was, what will happen to that poor dog?). Nicos, a handsome sailor, rescues her but she sends him away with no thanks. Later, in a hotel room, we discover that Raina and Jeff were part of a four-person tourist group. The other two are Bob, a handsome American, and Olivier, a handsome French painter. With Jeff gone, the other three rent a barge to go on a tour of the Greek islands, but the barge is junky with a small crew and cramped sleeping quarters, leading the three to decide to sleep on deck. Bob seems mildly interested in a romance with Raina, but when she recognizes Nicos, her rescuer, as one of the crew members, they begin a flirtation. We follow the group as they visit various islands, mostly being disappointed by them. Things we discover: Bob's father has done ruins restoration on some of the islands; Bob and Raina did one season of summer stock together; Olivier is gay and occasionally runs into some rough trade in the villages—Olivier doesn't want Bob to know he's gay and so acts a bit stand-offish with him, but Bob eventually figures it out. One night, Bob, Raina and Nicos set up a table on the beach and dine together, leading to Raina skinny-dipping late that night and to Olivier following her to the shore for a casual sexual encounter. Not terribly happy with the ports they're being taken to, the three decide to hop a Turkish barge which is larger and has more passengers (though we never see anyone else) but is in similarly grungy shape. After an evening of getting high on hashish, Olivier invites them to stay at a chateau in France; the beds are full of fleas and the connection between Raina and Bob begins to erode—though the two sleep in the same bed, they don't really bond as traditional lovers. In the end, Bob leaves and Raina and Olivier, who feels the pull of art ("I must work now while my generation is still important"), drive off down a French road.

This indie film, written and directed by Juleen Compton, who also plays Raina, got virtually no mainstream exposure in the United States, despite it feeling very much akin to the 1960s European new wave work of Godard or Antonioni. It does, however, come off like an American knock-off, which is not necessarily damning with faint praise. This feels like a marker for a new indie movie road that wasn't followed. The experiments in style feel rote, like something Compson did because it was expected. For example, the opening scene of Raina and Jeff arguing is presented mostly silent, until we hear an outburst of Jeff's. Then we hear Raina reply, but her lips don't move. Was that due to technical fudging or was it on purpose? Another time, Bob plays a banjo then stops, but we continue to hear it. Later, there are two short sequences in which the movement is choppy, as if frames were cut out at random. This definitely seems to have been done on purpose, but its meaning remains obscure. Similarly, the hash smoking scene is shot with distorting lenses. I rather like the "slice of life" feel of the narrative, beginning in the middle of the collapse of a relationship we know nothing about and ending with the futures of all three main characters up in the air, despite the apparent resolution of the Bob/Raina storyline (it felt a little like Brian leaving Sally at the end of Cabaret). There is an interesting sequence set in a diner/bar which may or may not be a gay establishment—Raina is the only woman there and Olivier pals around comfortably with the other men. Raina dances to the boppy pop song "Ya Ya" by Lee Dorsey and the men are entranced but remain distant.

The acting is about on a par with the other new wave films of the time, but it's difficult to judge the performances because of the superficial way the characters are written. Compson is fine as Raina, but she's not consistent in her actions, and her half-hearted suicide attempt feels against her nature (BTW, the dog remains with her throughout). Her sexuality is a part of her story but refreshingly, her sexual nature is not her be-all and end-all—mostly, I guess, she's seen as needing freedom at the expense of many other things. Gian Pietro Calasso is fine as Olivier, avoiding easy stereotypes in the portrayal of a confused gay man. (Calasso's brother Roberto was a famous Italian writer.) Alkis Giannakas is the handsome and occasionally shirtless Nicos who, despite his importance to the first half of the movie, more or less vanishes by the end. The outlier is Gary Collins, later a TV actor and talk show host, as Bob. He's a rather vanilla blond collegiate type—Collins was 27 but his character's age seems younger than that—and though I had my doubts that he would fit in with the other indie/Euro types, he provides a good balance in the cast. He is presented in a fairly neutral fashion, neither mocked nor envied, and though he clearly has affection for Raina, he is not swept away by passion (no one in the movie is, though Olivier has the potential to be). It's 90 minutes, and the first hour is well-paced, though things bog down near the end. Still, I was pleased to discover this unusual and unheralded film. Pictured are Collins (the blond), Compson and Calasso. [Criterion Channel]

VIRIDIANA (1961)

As Viridiana is about to take her vows to become a nun, the Mother Superior suggests that she take time to visit her sick uncle, Don Jaime, who has financially taken care of her for years. She has little affection for her uncle though she never says why. She also has no taste for the physical—at her uncle's house, she sleeps on the floor on a bed of thorns and can't bring herself to milk her uncle's cows. For his part, Don Jaime clearly lusts after Viridiana. He tells her that she looks like his wife, who died on their wedding night. On the last night of her visit, he gets her to put on his wife's wedding dress, then he drugs her coffee and carries her to bed, intending to rape her. He doesn't go through with it, but the next morning he tells her she's no longer a virgin and should give up on taking her vows. She goes to leave anyway, but in short order, her uncle commits suicide, hanging himself with a jump rope; she inherits the farm portion of his estate and decides to stay; and Don Jaime's bastard son Jorge arrives to take over the main house. He brings a girlfriend who leaves when she sees that Jorge has eyes for Viridiana, but a servant named Ramona has eyes for Jorge. To commit herself to Christian work despite not taking her vows, Viridiana opens up her part of the house to a flock of beggars, including a leper, but soon they have taken full advantage of her kindness and one drunken night while Jorge is gone, they occupy the main dining room and have a debauched feast, accompanied by the "Hallelujah Chorus" and climaxing with a parodic shot of the beggars reenacting Da Vinci's Last Supper. The beggars tie up Jorge when he returns and one tries to rape Viridiana. In the end, the police arrive to break things up, and in the last scene, Viridiana seems to have given up all thoughts of piety. She enters Jorge's room where he is playing cards with Ramona. She joins them as a pop song says, "Shake your cares away" and Jorge says, "The first time I saw you, I thought, my cousin and I will end up shuffling the deck together."

You can use Google to gather background on the anti-clerical director Luis Bunuel and the reception of this film in Spain (long story short: government censors passed the film until they realized how much it was mocking Christianity). For all the controversy this stirred up back in the day, the film actually seems relatively mild now until the final near-orgy. Even then, the problem isn't so much any graphic visualization as it is the mocking of both the poor and the church that claims to want to help them. Characterization is not Bunuel's strong point here as the proceedings are largely symbolic, but the performances are nicely fleshed out. The gorgeous Silvia Pinal anchors the movie with her strong but subtle performance. Very little that happens causes any change in Viridiana's placid exterior, right up to and including the conclusion. Fernando Rey (the uncle) and the handsome Francisco Rabal (Jorge) are effective as the two debauched males. The original ending, which was objectionable to the censors, had Viridiana entering Jorge's bedroom and closing the door. This approved ending, however, is even more salacious as it promises not just extramarital sex but a threesome. Pictured are Rabal and Pinal. [TCM]

THE WET PARADE (1932)

This story of the effects of both alcohol consumption and prohibition begins in 1916 Louisiana as Chilicote (Lewis Stone), once rich and respected, has descended into an alcoholic haze, stumbling in and out of bars. His daughter Maggie (Dorothy Jordan) tries to take care of him and gets him to stop drinking for a month, but he backslides, loses a huge amount of family money while gambling drunk, and commits suicide in a pigsty. At his funeral, when friends toast his memory, Maggie has an outburst, ranting against alcohol. Her brother Roger (Neil Hamilton, pictured below left), a writer, heads to New York City and stays in a hotel managed by Kip Tarleton (Robert Young) who runs the place for his aging father (Walter Huston), who himself has become an alcoholic—we see him take money meant to buy Bromo Seltzer for a tenant and use it to buy booze. Kip is a teetotaler and his mother prays for prohibition, and in a couple of years, she gets her wish. By now, Maggie has come to New York to check up on Roger who has become quite a drinker himself. Prohibition doesn't stop everyone from drinking as bootleggers step in to keep an underground supply going, using copies of legitimate liquor labels on their bottles even as the odds of much of that alcohol being poisoned increase. When Kip's mother tries to keep her husband from drinking from a bad jug, he attacks her and beats her to death. Kip and Maggie, united in an anti-alcohol stance, get married and Kip takes a job as a Prohibition enforcement agent. As he collects evidence, he has to learn to drink alcohol himself, and his partner Abe notes the irony that Kip had to "join Prohibition services to get his first drink." Ultimately, Prohibition doesn't work as people keep drinking, in private and in illegal speakeasies, and bad booze causes illness and death. The film ends in a kind of limbo, with Kip urged by his dying partner (shot in a raid) to get out of the service to take care of Maggie and their newborn son. The last line of the movie has Kip hoping that, by the time their son is grown up, "they’ll have it all figured out."

Historically speaking, this is an interesting document for a couple of reasons. The first is that it was made and released while Prohibition was still the law of the land but with the Democratic Party platform that year calling for repeal, change was in the air. Secondly, the movie avoids taking a strong stand about the issue of Prohibition. Certainly the fates of several characters make strong anti-booze points, but Prohibition is not seen as an effective solution. The film is based on a novel by Upton Sinclair which was apparently more pro-Prohibition than against. I think the movie works best as a mini-family saga. At two hours, it bogs down here and there, and two of the best performances, by Stone and Huston as the booze-soaked patriarchs, are limited as both characters leave the narrative prematurely, with Chilicote dying and Tarleton sent to prison. But 25-year-old Robert Young, in one of his earliest featured roles (he is billed below many of the other actors but arguably has the lead role in the narrative) is very good; he doesn't overdo the clean-living innocence of the character and is very good as a gung-ho crimefighter who slowly realizes that his work may not be terribly effective at fighting the effects of booze on society. 

Dorothy Jordan (pictured with Young at top right) is sidelined for much of the film as the long-suffering daughter and sister. Neil Hamilton's role starts off strong but his plotline is largely lost in the muddle. Jimmy Durante, as Young's partner, provides comic relief in a mostly serious role, and is OK, even getting a good death scene (though he uses his signature "ha-cha-cha" bit too many times). There are good turns from Wallace Ford as a buddy of Roger's, Myrna Loy as a good time floozy, Emma Dunn as Chilicote's wife, Clara Blandick as Tarleton's wife, and John Miljan as Kip's boss who is against Prohibition but does his sworn duty to uphold the law. At one point, it's observed that, under Prohibition, "peach fuzz kids are getting loaded at high noon," certainly not the intent of the law. Despite the tragedies of excessive drinking, we really do get the feeling by the end that Prohibition didn't help, and may have made this social problem worse. [TCM]

MODERATO CANTABILE (1960)

aka SEVEN DAYS ... SEVEN NIGHTS

Anne, the wife of a factory owner in a small French town, is with her young son Pierre as he takes, without enthusiasm, a piano lesson from Miss Girard in her apartment above a small diner. Girard has to continually prompt Pierre to play his piece "moderato cantabile," that is, in a moderate and melodic fashion. Suddenly they hear the awful scream of a woman from the diner. Investigating, Anne sees that a woman has been murdered by her lover. A crowd gathers, including Chauvin, an employee at Anne's husband's factory. They lock eyes, and later, in conversation, she admits she is obsessed with finding out what led to the murder. Chauvin agrees to dig around for information; he thinks she is bored and looking for vicarious adventure, and the same might be said for Chauvin. He follows Anne (usually accompanied by Pierre) around town. Eventually the two meet up at an abandoned house, and he tells her—most likely making up the details—a story of how the couple met, how she became bored with her life (perhaps an echo of how Anne feels in her marriage), and how, he guesses, she asked to be killed. Anne and Chauvin continue meeting, clearly growing attached to each other, but never consummating their relationship. One night at a fancy dinner party that her husband is giving, Anne gets drunk, embarrasses herself with awkward comments, and leaves the house, finding Chauvin alone in the empty diner. They talk; he notes that they have had seven days and nights together but that this must end and he must go. Their last anguished words to each other: he says, "I wish you were dead"; she replies, "Now I am." As he leaves, she lets out a long scream just like the murdered woman did at the beginning of the film. Her husband's car pulls up and he takes her back home.

Though I haven't seen this comparison in other commentaries on the film, this struck me as an existential (and mildly masochistic) version of David Lean's romantic wartime classic Brief Encounter. Over the seven days of the relationship between Anne and Chauvin, all they do is meet and talk; they barely even touch each other. I don't think they even smile at each other; their facial expressions are always tense and guilty. His stories about the diner couple are clearly being spun just so they'll have an excuse to meet up. As in Brief Encounter, not much happens on a narrative level, though the couple in the earlier film seem to come much closer to having a physical relationship than Anne and Chauvin ever do. But Jeanne Moreau (Anne) and Jean-Paul Belmondo  (Chauvin) do a lot of effective smoldering with their eyes and body language. They are attractive and intense actors, and even when the movie's pace bogs down, they remain interesting to watch. Aside from the little boy, the only other character with much presence is the piano teacher (Colette Regis) who disapproves of the boy's recalcitrance and ends by saying she will no longer give him lessons. The look of the movie matches the mood: gray and gloomy. It's based on a short novel by Marguerite Duras and it retains a literary feel throughout. I admit to almost giving up on the long-feeling 90 minute film but Moreau and Belmondo kept me with it. [YouTube]

FRANCIS (1950)

Francis the Talking Mule was the star of a successful little B-movie franchise for Universal in the early 1950s. The Mr. Ed television series of the 60s adapted the same idea of a domesticated animal who talks but only to one particular person. Francis was played by a mule called Molly and voiced by character actor Chill Wills, but the real star of movies was Donald O'Connor, who was 25 but looked a bit younger, as Peter Stirling, the guy Francis talks to. In Burma during the war, Peter, a second lieutenant, is separated from his platoon and stuck in place during a Japanese attack. An Army mule named Francis starts talking to him and gets him out of danger and back to headquarters. He tells his superiors about Francis, but the mule refuses to talk to anyone else and Peter is sent to a psychiatric ward when he spends his days in basket weaving. Despite having no qualifications, Peter is assigned to be a G2 clerk, working in intelligence. At the same time, Miss Gelder, a sexy French woman, arrives looking for sanctuary after being separated from her father. Francis begins feeding information to Peter who acts on it, capturing enemy soldiers, discovering a secret Japanese observation post, and warning of an imminent enemy air attack. He is lauded for his efforts, but each time, he insists that Francis deserves the credit, and each time, he is sent back to basket making. Eventually Francis finally agrees to talk to General Stevens because, being a military mule, he feels he must follow orders. Francis gets press attention, and Gelder is revealed to be a spy (a Tokyo Rose-type broadcaster). Francis is flown to the States as a celebrity, but winds up with Peter, now a small town bank teller. O'Connor (pictured with the mule), who is personable and believable as the somewhat hapless soldier, did five more Francis movies (and did Singin' in the Rain in the middle of them), with Mickey Rooney doing a final one before the series ended. Ray Collins is fine as a colonel, as is John McIntire as the general. Chill Wills voices the mule as an ornery cuss, not as a cutesy Disney character. I probably won’t seek out any more of these, but this was fairly painless fun. [TCM]

TEN CENTS A DANCE (1931)

Barbara Stanwyck, a gum-chewing tough gal, works at the Palais de Dance, a dance hall where men pay the working girls a dime to dance with them. Stanwyck is popular but her boss says she lacks animation and rhythm, blaming it on her troubles with her would-be boyfriend (Monroe Owsley) who lives at Stanwyck's boarding house and has, despite being unemployed, run up some gambling debt. The upper-class Ricardo Cortez comes in one night and, smitten with Stanwyck, just wants to sit and talk to her. He gives her a hundred dollar tip and she asks Cortez to give Owsley a job, which he does, as an accountant at Cortez's firm. Though Cortez continues to dote on Stanwyck, giving her money and a new dress, she decides to marry Owsley. It's easy to see where this pre-Code melodrama is going—Owsley slips into heel mode, losing money at gambling, hiding it from his wife, and staying out till all hours with disreputable pals and loose women. Stanwyck goes back to work at the dance hall and occasionally chats with Cortez who is still in love with her. When Owsley embezzles money from Cortez's firm and is about to be caught, Stanwyck visits Cortez at his high-rise apartment and asks for $5000. Cortez knows he's being played for a chump ("The only love letter to write to a woman: pay to the order of…") but gives it to her anyway. Owsley takes the money and replaces the embezzled amount, then proceeds to berate Stanwyck, assuming she compromised herself. Stanwyck is stuck between the jealous weakling husband and the loving but disillusioned Cortez. What to do?

The credits tell us that this movie is based on the popular song "Ten Cents a Dance," about the rough life of what was called a taxi dancer. It's depressing, telling of torn dresses, trampled feet, only running across "pansies and rough guys," and being too tired to go to sleep back at home. But after the first ten minutes or so, this movie leaves the taxi drivers and their troubles behind and becomes a predictable melodrama about a woman torn between loyalty to a heel and attraction to a rich guy who may think he can buy her for himself. But the outcome is never in doubt, partly due to the casting. We know Stanwyck will stay pure and true to herself (unlike in the infamous BABY FACE of 1933 in which she sleeps her way to the top); Owsley is pinched and passive (and weirdly looks a bit like Pee-Wee Herman) and is clearly not worthy of Stanwyck, whereas Cortez, who sometimes played bad guys, is rich, handsome and dignified, and is willing to wait for Stanwyck to come to her senses. Both actors are good, but Stanwyck is always worth watching—her characters are strong and smart (sometimes street-smart) and she can usually make even one-dimensional characters (like this one mostly is) interesting. Best line, Stanwyck to Owsley: "You're not a man—you're not even a good sample!" Pictured are Cortez and Stanwyck. [TCM]

FOOTPRINTS ON THE MOON (1975)

We see blue-tinted footage of a moon landing, but when an astronaut comes out of the vehicle, he is dragging an unconscious astronaut out who is left on the moon. We see a man named Blackmann at Mission Control shouting instructions. Then we see a woman wake up. She has apparently been dreaming of a movie she saw years ago called Footprints on the Moon. The woman, Alice, a translator living in Italy, discovers she is missing any memory of the last three days and is in danger of losing her job. She then finds strange things in her apartment including a torn-up postcard of a hotel on the Turkish island of Garma, and a bloodstained dress in her closet. She also has visions of an Oriental room with stained glass windows featuring peacocks. Visiting Garma hoping to find answers, she winds up facing more mysteries. People on the island remember her but as a redhead named Nicole. A handsome young man named Harry gets chummy with her, and she vaguely recognizes him, but she hears more unsettling things about Nicole and her paranoid behavior and finds the red wig she wore on the island as Nicole. Visions of the moon movie and the peacock window continue. By this time, I was worrying that lots of details were accumulating that would all not amount to much. Well, we do eventually get a surface explanation of what’s going on, and it turns out that Harry knew her briefly years ago when they were teenagers and and interacted with her a few days earlier as Nicole. When Harry takes her to his family's house, she sees the peacock windows. Is Alice having a breakdown? Is she suffering from some past trauma? Are her paranoid feelings justified?

If you like your psychological mysteries wrapped up tight, this is not the film for you. [I'll try to avoid obvious spoilers, but I do need to bring up a couple of plot twists.] We get some answers in a lengthy sequence at the end, but those are potentially undercut by the visuals of the last few minutes, which leaves open the possibility that the sinister Blackmann (a cameo from Klaus Kinski, and how much more sinister can you get?) is real and not an old movie memory. This, however, brings up unanswered questions. I feel like most of the puzzle pieces are there but there's maybe one missing. My theory, and one which I have not seen voiced online yet, is that Alice is experiencing some past sexual trauma, as we see a flashback which implies that Harry and Alice had sex in their teenaged past. It's not presented as coerced, but still it's there as a plot thread that isn't worked into the narrative. If you can deal with an ending that leaves you to interpret the situation, I recommend this. The director, Luigi Bazzoni, filmed in the Turkish town of Phaselis which allows him to indulge an attention to architecture and physical place that rivals Antonioni's, and the visuals, though mostly caught under cloudy skies, are attractive. The Brazilian Florinda Bolkan (Alice/Nicole, at top left) gives a one-note performance (that note being confused paranoia) but it's called for her, as her character's background remains largely obscure—if it was a little clearer, the ending would be clearer as well. British actor Peter McEnery (right) is nicely laid back as Harry, which balances out Bolkan's more intense performance. [BTW, virtually all online sources including IMDb refer to his character as Henry, but in the English version I watched, they were clearly saying Harry. Plus, there is a quick shot of him wearing a necklace that says Harry.] The Oscar nominated Russian actress Lila Kedrova has the only other substantive role as a tourist who remembers Alice as Nicole. Some giallo lineage is claimed by some critics because Bazzoni directed a well regarded giallo called The Fifth Cord, but there is little sex or gore, and it's not really a whodunit. I'd never heard of this but it came up in YouTube's algorithm for me and I'm glad to have run across it. The print I saw was clear and sharp, but I think that may have been taken down, and the one that is still up is presented with awful widescreen distortion. Avoid that one. It’s been released recently by a British company on Blu-ray. [YouTube]

THE NIGHT OF THE PARTY (1934)

Newspaper magnate Lord Studholme is throwing a party in honor of Her Serene Highness Princess Amelia of Corsova. Among the guests: Guy, Studholme's secretary; Peggy, Studholme's daughter who is in love with (and might already be secretly married to) Guy; Peggy's friend Joan whom Studholme is trying to blackmail into having an affair; Chiddiatt, a flamboyant writer whose work is always trashed in Studholme's papers. Eventually, police commissioner Sir John Holland, Joan's father, shows up. The group plays a party murder game with all guests playing characters using information given to them on a card. One person is assigned to be the victim and one to be the investigator who interviews everyone and tries to figure out who the killer is. But during this game, the lights go out and a real dead body is found: Lord Studholme. With almost everyone at the party having a grudge of some sort against him, Sir John has his work cut out for him as he investigates for real. This feels like an average Agatha Christie mystery (though it was based not on Christie but on a play by Roland Pertwee who wrote dozens of British films in the 30s and 40s) and it does indeed play out like you'd expect, although the suspects are all let out of the house, and the finale is set in a courtroom instead of a drawing room, and there is a surprising climax. With a running time of one hour, it's compact, feeling like an episode of the modern-day Poirot series, with a full half-hour set up for character development before the murder occurs. The acting is solid all around. Leslie Banks is fine as Sir John; other standouts include Malcolm Keen as Studholme, Ian Hunter (pictured) as Guy, and the always eccentric Ernest Thesiger as the eccentric writer. This is an early film from Michael Powell done mostly in a workmanlike style, though with some nicely fluid camerawork. Entertaining if predictable. Retitled The Murder Party for American release. [YouTube]

THE CRIMES OF THE BLACK CAT (1972)

Peter, a blind musician, overhears a conversation in a bar. The voices sound tense—Peter hears a reference to blackmail, and when one of the two, a woman who we see is wearing a white cape and hood, leaves, Peter picks up an unusual scent from her. Peter was stood up by a girlfriend named Paola, a fashion model, and the next day when she opens up a wicker basket in her dressing room, she screams and is found dead with a bloody scratch on her face. As the police investigate, we get to know other people involved: Francoise, the head of the fashion business; Victor, her adulterous husband; Susan, the white-caped woman who is also a drug addict; Helga, a lesbian model who didn't get along with Paola; and Burton, Peter's faithful valet who never trusted Paola. The police think that Paola died of a heart attack, but Peter conducts his own investigation with help from Paola's roommate Margo. This being an Italian-made giallo, many genre conventions show up: in addition to the blind character, the fashion house setting, and adultery, there are people slashed with knives, baroque methods of murder, plotholes galore (I can't really summarize the last half of the movie because I'm not clear about all the details and I have no desire to watch it again), some choppy editing, and terrible dubbing, especially when overlapping dialogue is used. We're not surprised, given the English title, that a black cat is responsible for some of the deaths, let loose with poison on its claws and attracted to the victim by a dose of a catnip-like scent. Despite the many plot problems, the ultimate solution is satisfying, though I could not tell you exactly what happened or even why all the murders were necessary. Though Anthony Steffan is top-billed as Peter, he turns in a weak performance; much better are Giacomo Rossi Stuart as the playboy Victor and Shirley Corrigan as Margo. Sylva Koscina is fine as Francoise, though she's mostly absent from the middle of the movie. Umberto Raho is nicely sly as Burton. For much of the film, there isn't much gore, only a cat's severed head (and I never figured out how it got that way or who did it), but near the climax, there is a shockingly graphic and unsettling shot of a killer slashing a woman's breasts, inspired perhaps by the shower scene in PSYCHO, that I actually had to turn away from. The Italian title translates to Seven Shawls of Yellow Silk—the baskets with the cats are covered in yellow silk. Generally, it's an ineptly written and ineptly filmed mess, but I guess you could say that about many giallo films. [YouTube]

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]