The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2021: The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), directed by Anthony Mann

 

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune - "Empire" by Shakira

     It is said that all empires must one day fall, and the reason it is said is because of Rome. To the untrained eye it might seem inconceivable that the Roman Empire would have collapsed the way it did; They were one of the most dominant military and political entities on the planet at the time, stretching from Europe to Asia, from Britain to Africa, builders of vast networks of roads and aqueducts, writers of poetry and theater. Yet it was exactly that advancement, economically, socially,  and technologically that was the problem, that constant and inevitable clash between progress and regression that led to its slow dissolution and usurpation by the Mongols, the Visigoths, et cetera. A Roman Empire still existed afterwards for a couple centuries afterwards of course, but it was not, indeed could not, be the Rome that had been. Such is the way of life.

     The situation with Rome is not exactly like the one with the movie industry in the 1960s, but there are similarities. As with Rome the movie industry had grown over the years to be a veritable behemoth, and that size allowed it to perform grander and grander feats. Thus we saw the rise of ‘epics’ such as Ben-Hur and Marathon alum Saladin, films with large set pieces, large casts and large budgets. Then we saw them again, and again, until diminishing returns set in and the movie industry found that in their desperate rush to capitalize on this trend that it was difficult to fund any movies at all. Of course the movie industry didn’t collapse and epic films didn’t cease to exist, but for a while the dynamics of filmmaking certainly shifted. It’s doubtful whether the Hollywood New Wave in the 70s, the rise of Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, et al. would have happened if not for the problems the movie industry brought on itself, but surely that’s a thing of the past and has no bearing on the present day.

     Released in 1964, The Fall of the Roman Empire was written by Ben Barzman, Basilio Franchina and Philip Yordan and directed by Anthony Mann (El Cid, The Glenn Miller Story) through Samuel Bronston Productions. The year is 180 A.D. and Caesar Marcus Aurelius (Alec Guinness) has been overseeing the war effort against the tribal peoples of what is now called Germany. Aurelius has grown old and ill however, and his thoughts turn increasingly not to war but of peace, a Pax Romana that will unite all of the peoples of the Empire as free citizens of Rome. A monumental task worthy of a Caesar, and Aurelius decides that Gaius Metallus Livius (Stephen Boyd), commander of the Northern Army, is a man worthy of the title. Before that decision can be made final though, Aurelius is murdered by those unwilling to let peace damage their pocketbooks, and Aurelius’ son Commodus (Christopher Plummer) becomes Caesar instead. Gone are those lofty goals, gone is the Pax Romana, Commodus is here to Make Rome Great Again and he’s going to do it, no matter what his advisors or reality says otherwise. What does this mean for Livius and his beloved Lucilla (Sophia Loren)? What does this mean for Rome? I’m not sure, but if I had to guess, probably nothing good.

     An event like the collapse of the Roman Empire demands a film that is epic (natch) in scope, and on a visual level The Fall of the Roman Empire succeeds. The film takes place primarily in two locations, a military outpost in Germany and the city of Rome itself, and both look absolutely gorgeous. Huge panaramic shots that really emphasize on a visceral level the film’s scope, which is highlighted when Mann packs a scene with dozens if not hundreds of people. There are a few moments where a green screen or some other film trick is used to place a character where they’re not, but for the most part it seems natural, which for all their faults is really something you only really get with these kinds of films.

     Such stakes also call for some big fights, and The Fall of the Roman Empire has more than its share. These are not orderly affairs where soldiers jauntily march into battle, this is barely controlled chaos. Not a lot of blood, this is the 60s mind you, but there are people getting set on fire, horses falling and landing on people, it’s easy to forget sometimes that you’re watching a film and not a riot at a renaissance fair. While it might be considered to compare the level of Hollywood’s resources when compared to any other country’s film industry, The Fall of the Roman Empire blows Saladin out of the water. Despite both films centering around military conflicts, I don’t know if there’s anything in Saladin aside from Richard III’s invasion and the siege engine scene that compares to even the first battle in this film. Though there’s plenty of Hollywood ‘clanging two blades together over and over’ style sword fighting, there’s also a visceral quality to the combat that is effective even by modern standards.

     Of course it wouldn’t be a movie about Rome if the cast wasn’t made up of mostly white people, and Fall of the Roman Empire refuses to break the mould in that respect. Stephen Boyd is the sore thumb of the bunch, this blonde haired blue eyed guy with the flat American accent who looks more Teutonic than the fucking Germans they’re fighting, but you can tell by that chin dimple why they wanted him and he doesn’t do that bad. Sophia Loren is fine (and the only Roman in the cast who’s actually from Rome), a bit melodramatic but then these are melodramatic roles. Alec Guinness and James Mason (as Timonides) were on-screen veterans for a couple decades by this point so you know they know their way around a script, but the most entertaining performance is Christopher Plummer as the increasingly unhinged Caesar Commodus. The Emperor of Rome being insane is something of a cliche at this point, likely due to stories of Nero and Caligula entering the public consciousness, but Plummer does great work in making Commodus a truly despicable character. A delusional narcissist, bully, and a sniveling cretin, you start to dislike him the moment he gets on screen and by the end you absolutely despise. Which is good! You don’t need to make an antagonist some tragic figure, sometimes it’s enough to just have some piece of shit surrounded by other pieces of shit who wields too much power. Even though we learn a bit of Commodus’ backstory over the course of the film I wouldn’t say that he ever takes that step into becoming sympathetic, and I think Plummer’s performance helps cement that.

     That being said, The Fall of the Roman Empire is not simply a tale of morals, but of politics as well. Commodus and his coterie are certainly villainous in character, reveling in murder and upholding the institution of slavery, and in a grander sense represent the inability of the Roman state (or any state) to resolve the contradictions inherent within its design and thus its use of violence in order to maintain stability. Livius and his side are depicted as the heroes, but it is portrayed quite clearly that their opposition is just as much a political decision as it is an ethical one. Marcus Aurelius’ desire for a Pax Romana is predicated less so on philosophy and more so on building a unified bulwark against the Persians, and one of the major points in Timonides’ speech to the Senate is on the economical viability of free men over slaves (‘free’ in this context meaning peasantry rather than the romanticized American ‘freedom’ that we hear about today, even though conflation of the two was most likely intended by the screenwriter). Not to mention that all of Livius’ actions are made in order to maintain and even expand the hegemony of the Roman Empire, which ultimately makes him no different from Commodus aside from being more capable at it. The abolition of slavery is obviously a worthy cause and so we can support Livius in that way, but in the end they both represent failing attempts at stifling the progress of history, because the slaves would be freed and Rome would fall regardless of the wishes of these men but by the will of the masses. It’s a lot more nuanced of a film than I was expecting, even if it presents itself as some sort of melodrama.

 

     Speaking of Lucilla’s whining, there’s this thing that this movie does where a character has an internal monologue, but then they also just say things out loud sometimes as well. It only happens two times in the film, once with Marcus Aurelius and the other with Lucilla, and both times it doesn’t work. I can see where the scenes might have looked good on paper, but in execution it’s either the narration doesn’t really add anything to the scene or it makes the character in question look like someone with a severe mental illness rambling to himself on a street corner. Either have the character just say that narration out loud, this is the kind of movie where you could get away with that, or just have them stay silent and physically convey their emotions. Less is more and all that.

     One last word of warning to those prospective cinephiles out there, The Fall of the Roman Empire is advanced material if you’re not used to older films. Tops out at just under three hours, and no one talks like a real person. If you read through Shakespeare in high school and hated it then this might not be for you. It doesn’t skimp out on the action scenes though, if that’s what you’re into, and I think Livius and Lucilla’s star crossed romance set against the backdrop of political corruption and societal decay (which I’m sure bares no resemblance to these modern times) is enough to keep one invested. The Fall of the Roman Empire gets the recommendation, crack open a wineskin this Halloween and enjoy.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2021: Brain Donors (1992), directed by Dennis Dugan

The Trailer

 and

The Appropriate Tune - "Crazy Words, Crazy Tune", by Johnny Marvin

       Cyclical trends. Every year or so it seems that a generation of people rediscover something that was popular with the previous generation and suddenly society is inundated with the stuff. In the 70’s folks were all about the 50’s; They watched Happy Days on their TV sets, went to see Grease and American Graffitti in theaters and attended Elvis Presley concerts in droves. The 90’s saw two Woodstocks and the revival of both swing and lounge music, for some reason. Even in this day and age it’s not difficult to find a song or a movie that’s lifting the 80’s aesthetic or a video game trying to be the next Earthbound or Final Fantasy 6. A common complaint thrown at Hollywood is its insistence on reboots and remakes, but the fact of the matter is that our society in general has been recursive. We’re constantly looking backwards, recycling, repackaging and deconstructing things we’ve done before, even if we don’t really have anything to say.

       Possibly the weirdest example of recursive pop culture are what I would tentatively call

the vaudeville comedy ‘revival’, in quotes because it has to be marginally successful to be considered a revival. Once in a blue moon someone in Hollywood gets it into their head that what the movie-going public wants is some of that Depression-era cinema, a return to those halcyon days where films were more than Kevin Hart screaming at things for 90 minutes. Rather than going the Oscar bait period drama route however, ala Chaplin, they decide to just make one of those movies. Own the rights to Laurel & Hardy but both men have been dead for decades? Well just grab a fat guy and a skinny guy and have them be Laurel & Hardy! Those 3 Stooges rights burning a hole in your pocket? Call up Will Sasso and have him hang out with the cast of Jersey Shore. It doesn’t matter that these were professional actors and comedians who spent their lives perfecting their characters and their act, just have some folks in cosplay do impressions and it’s basically the same thing right? Why book Paul McCartney for your concert when you can just get a Beatles cover band? Even if they ended up being decent movies, I don’t know what the incentive would be to watch them over an actual Laurel & Hardy or 3 Stooges film. More jokes about smartphones, I guess?

Which brings us to today’s film: Brain Donors, written by Pat Proft and directed by Dennis Dugan through Zucker Brothers Productions, back when the Zuckers were known for things like Airplane! and Police Squad rather than Scary Movie 3. Bob Nelson, Mel Smith and John Turturro star as Jacques (the oddball), Rocco (the streetwise conman) and Roland T. Flakfizer (the silver-tongued lawyer), three men who are brought together when the wealthy husband of wealthy philanthropist Lillian Oglethorpe unexpectedly passes. Mr. Oglethorpe’s will sets aside a significant chunk of change for the creation of a ballet company, and long-time toadie Edmund Lazlo is confident that lucrative chairman position belongs to him, only for his schemes to be dashed when Roland (who had sweet-talked his way into being the widow Oglethorpe’s personal solicitor) catches a whiff of easy money and sweet-talks his way into consideration for the job. The winner will obviously be one who provides the greatest boon for the company though, and Edmund has The Great Volare waiting in the wings. If Roland and the boys want that fat paycheck they’re gonna have to think on their feet, which is probably going to make it hard to stand up, and Edmund isn’t going to take it sitting down, although from the look of him he’s got plenty of experience. Tutu troubles and general chaos abound, which would have arguably been a much better title for this film than Brain Donors.

This is certainly an odd one. To say that Brain Donors takes inspiration from the Marx Brothers is like saying Vanilla Ice took inspiration from David Bowie and Queen. Tuturro, Smith and Nelson are slotted into the same roles that Groucho, Chico and Harpo would have been, doing the exact same things the Marx Brothers would have done, it’s got the rich socialite that in the past would have been played by Margaret Dumont, it’s got the tacked on romance subplot, they even name drop A Night at the Opera in the credits. About the only thing they don’t do is musical interlude where one of the leads plays the piano or the harp, which admittedly might have been a bit difficult to fit into a movie that was ostensibly about dancing, but that wouldn’t have stopped the originals.

What sets Brain Donors apart from those revival films though is that while it is essentially a Marx Brothers movie, the three leads are not pretending to be the Marx Brothers. Mel Smith fills the same role as Chico Marx, but Rocco is played as a working-class Brit, rather than an Italian. Bob Nelson is the Harpo of the film but he’s not just rehashing Harpo, he’s even got dialogue. They’re subtle changes sure, but they serve to establish Brain Donors as a loving homage to the work of the Marx Bros., which is a far more palatable option than the straight up copy and paste job of the Laurel & Hardy and 3 Stooges reboot. Turning an eye to what came before without outright cannibalizing it, a novel concept indeed.

Brain Donors also sets itself apart from its influence in the way it utilizes visual comedy. The Marx Brothers were no stranger to that of course, especially Harpo, but it seems far more prevalent and elaborate in this film than it did in those films. The benefits of several decades of filmmaking techniques, but having David and Jerry Zucker in the producer chair very likely had a part in that as well. The scene where Jacques opens up a laptop computer and it extends out in such a way to eventually become a full-sized desktop PC, complete with a desk and a blowup doll definitely feels like something you would have seen in Naked Gun or The Kentucky Fried Movie. 

Unfortunately as the successor to the Marx Brothers filmography suffers from the same issues that one could place on those films, which feel more and more blatant when removed from their original context. The plot is superfluous, an excuse to tackle the Brothers’ favorite subject (high society dipshits), but paper thin as it is they still seem to struggle to make this ballet concept work. They’ve got the tacked on romance subplot as I said, but they’ve taken it a step farther to the point that it is positively anemic. Zeppo at least got a song or two, he shared the screen with his brothers a couple times, he wasn’t the moneymaker but he was still relevant to some degree. By contrast Alan, this movie’s male romantic lead, is just some guy. He dances a couple times, in a movie about dancers it’s bound to happen sooner or later, but he never really interacts with the leads in any meaningful way and to be honest I can barely recall what he looks like. I remember his fiance Lisa a bit better but she also barely has anything to do in this movie. Maybe like 3 minutes of romantic drama that is instantly resolved by the next scene, and having to fend off a rape attempt, because apparently we can’t have a movie without one of those.

       I also can’t let this review go by without mentioning how much I hate the score. Music in cinema has changed over the years, the orchestral score is not as dominant as it once was, but sometimes a film comes along that makes you think maybe we were better off back when all movies sounded the same. Why a movie paying tribute to films from the 30s sounds like a PC adventure game from the 90s I don’t know, but it’s another one of those things that just feels off. Shouldn’t the score be zanier? Some big band swing with lots of brass? Why does the opening song sound like someone plunking away on a toy xylophone? Combined with the rather long claymation sequence at the beginning you’d think you’d accidentally popped in an episode of some obscure European children’s show.

In an ironic twist though, I think Brain Donors’ biggest problem is the exact thing I was praising it for earlier: These guys aren’t the Marx Brothers. They certainly aren’t bad, but they lack the fire that made the Marx Brothers the comedians that they were. John Tuturro is a great actor, but every time I watched him toss off one-liners as Roland it felt like he was trying to be funny, whereas Groucho was funny without really trying. It’s that effortlessness that really made the Marx Brothers what they were as comedians; They were always two steps ahead of anyone else, and every time they opened their mouths or set their sights on someone they proved it. Sometimes Groucho or Chico would drop a line so quickly that it would take a second or two to register, while here they stop the film entirely so they can push out a gag. The Brain Donors cast has the basic act down, they’ve certainly got some good lines, but without the Marx’s chaotic energy it just doesn’t hit the way it should. Brain Donors is certainly wacky but it’s not always funny, if that makes sense.

When Brain Donors hit theaters in 1992 it was not a great success, grossing under a million dollars, and it doesn’t seem to have gained a significant cult following in the years since, in fact I didn’t even know this movie existed until last year. Which makes sense, having now seen it for myself. Fans of obscure 90s video store fodder or screwball superfans might want to give Brain Donors a watch, but I think everyone else would be okay if they skipped it and went for Duck Soup instead. Then maybe later they could watch a Marx Brothers movie.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2020: The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), directed by Terence Fisher

 

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Frankenstein", by New York Dolls

      Universal Studios. Not only are they responsible for producing and distributing films which laid down the foundation for horror in cinema, but they also made sure it would always be seen as cheaply made pablum thrown out for a quick buck. Yes, decades before films like Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street would be mocked and parodied for the seemingly endless additions to its canon, it was actually Universal that wrote the book on horror ‘franchises’. Dracula suddenly had a daughter crawl out of the woodwork, and later a son. The Invisible Man gave way to The Invisible Woman, and later another man (although this one was an agent) before he got his revenge. The Mummy got into a whole mess of trouble, and even The Creature from the Black Lagoon had a few adventures before the curtains closed. No, not all of them followed established continuity or feature the same actors, but that wasn’t the point. You remembered Universal’s Dracula, so maybe if we put his name on this film it’d sell a couple more tickets, and so on and on. Didn’t matter if the movie was good, as long as it could make money. Which is why movie studios nowadays get straight to the point and just remake films and give them the exact same name, Halloween (1979), Halloween (2007) and Halloween (2018) for example, no matter how confusing that might be for the movie-going audience. Thanks Universal!

Of the Universal Monster line, Frankenstein had it a bit better than most. Four years after the whirlwind success of the original Frankenstein in 1931 we’d see a sequel in Bride of Frankenstein; James Whale would return to the director’s chair, Boris Karloff would return as The Monster, and aside from being a good film it’s introduction of The Bride into pop culture would go on to ensure its status as a classic and fixture of shitty film blogs on the internet. Four years after that Universal would close out the decade with Son of Frankenstein; James Whale was out in favor of Rowland Lee and Karloff would make his final appearance in his famous role, but the inclusion of Basil Rathbone and Bela Lugosi as a hunchback by the name of Ygor (bet that’ll never come up again) ends up pushing it into recommended viewing territory, at least it did when I reviewed it. After that...eh. There was The Ghost of Frankenstein, which saw Lugosi return but didn’t really drive me to do the same. After that would be Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, also known as one of the biggest cockblocks in horror cinema history, and then House of Frankenstein, which was actually a sequel to one of the biggest cockblocks in horror cinema history (also Son of Dracula). Finally in ‘48, and I do mean final because there were only 5 movies after this, we got Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, which was actually pretty good and a movie that I might return to in a review someday, but it does seem a rather ignominious end. Once a menace to movie-goers, now reduced to a walking parody used to spook comedians. Jeez, you’d think everyone had just come off of a worldwide war or something.

Anyway, forget about Universal. It’s Hammer time.

Released in 1957, The Curse of Frankenstein was the first of three movies directed by Terence Fisher upon which the name of Hammer Horror would be built, followed subsequently by The Horror of Dracula and The Mummy. Peter Cushing stars as the titular Baron Victor Frankenstein, a man possessed with an intelligence as great as his arrogance. Ever since he was a baby baron Victor had explored the mysteries of the life, spending his adolescence in research and study with his friend and tutor Paul Kemper (Robert Urquhart). Then one day, a breakthrough: they manage to take a dog that was dead and bring it back to life, in complete defiance of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. The greatest medical discovery the world has ever known, if you let the world know that is, and yet Victor hesitates. Bringing life back to something that was previously dead is certainly an amazing feat, but wouldn’t it be even more amazing to bring life to something that had never lived at all? To create life, in a way humanity has never seen before? Then you’d not just be the most important scientist of your generation, you’d be the most important human being that’s ever lived. For a prize like that Victor’d be willing to do just about anything. Maybe even...murder?

Even though Universal’s Frankenstein and Hammer’s Frankenstein films were released 26 years apart, you get the sense that Fisher and Hammer wanted to be as different as possible from that earlier. The Monster (played by Christopher Lee) is not the sympathetic creature that Karloff’s Monster was nor is he given that much focus, he’s just a monster who doubles as a plot device. Similarly Victor Frankenstein is not the repentant figure driven to undo his own grisly work, as it was in the ‘31 film and the original novel, he is out and out the villain of the film. Curse of Frankenstein doesn’t even have a mob of angry villagers wielding pitchforks and torches, although it is teased at one point. ‘This wasn’t your daddy’s Frankenstein’, it all seems to say, and it was the same philosophy that seemed to carry over as Hammer went on. Dracula would turn up the sleaze as much as late 50’s British society could stand, The Mummy...well, he’s basically The Monster with a tragic backstory. Even Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde got its own little Hammer twist, although in that case I doubt the Paramount movie was much of a factor in the decision.

Not only did this film kickstart Hammer as the gold standard in horror cinema for a while, it also established Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee as staples of genre cinema for the rest of the careers. Not quite as much for Lee, who as I said is far less of a character than Karloff’s Monster was, but Cushing is far and away the highlight of the film. His portrayal of Frankenstein is fantastic, the very model of a gentleman on the surface but willing and able to throw away ethics and human decency when it benefits him or his work. The living embodiment of that ‘you thought so much about whether or not you could you didn’t think about whether or not you should’ line from Jurassic Park (a version of which even makes it way here). He reminds me a bit of ol’ Herbert West from one of my favorite horror movies actually, Re-Animator, except even worse if you can believe it. Herbert was a contemptible person, true, but he really presents himself as anything else. Victor on the other hand, while it seems like he’s capable of empathy at certain points, you’re never sure whether he’s being sincere or whether he’s being plainly manipulative. Occasionally it feels like they are trying a bit too hard to make him the bad, like stealing human body parts so he can stitch them together into some hideous flesh ogre wasn’t bad enough, but Cushing is so damn good at being a sociopath it’s not hard to see why Hammer revisited the character several more times over the years.

I also really like the art direction in Curse of Frankenstein. While the Universal monster films had that mix of Expressionism, the then-modern era and the era of the source material (at least the early ones), CoF is much more grounded and period-appropriate. Which might seem contradictory, given how often I’ve praised weird aesthetics in film, but there’s something about this slightly grimy, yet almost color saturated Georgian design that I find appealing. Especially when it comes to Frankenstein’s laboratory, as I’ve loved the concept of steampunk and otherwise ‘old’ technology ever since I first read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Time Machine. Again it doesn’t match the iconic look of Universal’s spark-spitting dynamos and what have you, but I think Curse of Frankenstein’s collection of bubbling beakers and tubs of strange liquids lends itself more to the idea of Frankenstein being this medical genius who has bridged the worlds of science and alchemy rather than just some guy who stuck some body parts together and shocked it a couple times. Curse of Frankenstein feels ‘real’, I guess, and the easier it is to suspend your disbelief when you’re watching genre films, the better off you are.

Unfortunately Curse of Frankenstein does suffer from a bit of ‘Escape from the Planet of the Apes’ syndrome, by which I mean it was a small production (270,000 dollar budget) and it feels like it. As nice as Castle Frankenstein looks on the inside, the fact that we spend so much time there makes things feel claustrophobic, especially when it’s the same four people talking to each other as well. You do get the occasional scene outside, but the way they’re shot is usually locked in on the characters so you don’t get much of a sense of space. It would make sense in context, since this is Frankenstein telling his story, but since there are moments that happen that he couldn’t possibly have known about, there’s not an excuse beyond ‘we’ve got no money’.

We’ve also got a small cast, and like I said, Peter Cushing is the reason you watch this movie. Robert Urquhart is okay as Paul Kremper, but like 80 percent of this movie is entering a room and complaining about something, and it feels like they subtly try to push a romance between him and Elizabeth despite him looking like he was in his early 30s when she was like 6, which is just fucking creepy. Hazel Court as Elizabeth Frankenstein, is...there. That’s not meant as a slight against the actress, she’s literally a Chekov’s Gun to build tension for the climax, otherwise it makes no sense that if Paul was so disturbed by Victor’s experiments that he was worried for her life that he wouldn’t have told her in the scene when he tried to get her to leave. Or later on, when they basically redo the scene and Paul has even more reason to want her to leave. Maybe if they actually pushed that romance angle, despite my reservations about it, there could have been some drama there, but they don’t, so she’s just...there. Waiting.

While she’s waiting, I’m going to go ahead and give The Curse of Frankenstein the recommendation. Putting aside all the smoke I’ve blown up Hammer’s ass, it really is an intriguing adaptation of Mary Shelley’s work, not all that accurate to the novel but it approaches the concept from a perspective that I haven’t seen a Frankenstein adaptation really do since then, which is a shame. If I were looking to be controversial I’d say Horror of Dracula and The Mummy suck so just watch this, but I do think if you’re a rookie looking into Hammer Horror or older horror movies, this is a good place to start. A bit like a mild cheddar cheese: It’s got a little bit of a bite, but it goes down smooth.

Don’t ask me what Frankenstein has to do with cheese. It should be obvious.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2020: The Big Hit (1998), directed by Kirk Wong

 

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Don't Sleep", by Mark Wahlberg

      You can thank the youtube channel Rebeltaxi for today’s entry in the Marathon. Normally I don’t like covering films that I’ve seen covered by someone else, preferring to go in as fresh as possible, but I was so intrigued by what I saw that eventually I just had to see it for myself. Plus the Marathon feels a bit more mellow this year, and I wanted to spice things up with some action. So yeah, give Rebeltaxi some love if you’ve got the time, even though he’s already way more popular than I’ll ever be. Dude mainly covers Western animation, and I think he’s got a podcast or some shit.

      Released in 1998, or Lebowski’s Year as it’s known in the Thunderbird household, The Big Hit was the brainchild of Hong Kong director Che-Kirk Wong and writer Ben Ramsey. Marky Mark Wahlberg stars as Melvin Smiley, a man with a Dangerfield-esque respect deficiency. He’s got a secret girlfriend milking him for cash, a fiance that’s got some rather overbearing parents, tumultuous tummy troubles, his criminal buddies treat him like a pushover (oh, Melvin’s a contract killer by the way) and worst of all, he’s being hounded by the local video rental place over an overdue tape. Not exactly living the life of Riley, but when his buddy Cisco (Lou Diamond Phillips) comes to him with a little side hustle, the illusion of happiness might be able to last a little longer. Seems like a simple enough job; kidnap Keiko Nishi, daughter of local Japanese business magnate Jiro Nishi, ransom her off for a million dollars, and that’s that. As long as something didn’t come up, like Jiro going bankrupt immediately prior this or him being personal friends with their boss, then they’re good. But what are the odds of that?

      Making a quick return to Rodney Dangerfield, remember that scene in Back to School where he’s at a party and he makes a sandwich by cutting a baguette in half  dumping a tray of hors d'oeuvres in it? That’s kind of what The Big Hit feels like to me. You’ve got some Tarantino in there, with its quirky, conversational criminals. There’s the frenetic energy of Hong Kong action films, made even more legitimate with that John Woo executive producer credit. You’ve got some screwball comedy in there (complete with cartoon sound effects), a touch of grindhouse cinema, all wrapped up with a soundtrack that sounds like it came from some lost edition of Tony Hawk Pro Skater. There are a lot of films where you’ll see the words ‘rollercoaster ride of excitement’ used to describe them, but I don’t know if I’ve seen a movie recently that lives that gimmick as much as The Big Hit. Like I’m craving corn dogs and cotton candy right now thinking about it. 

      It helps that they’ve got a great cast to work with. No one does slack-jawed schlub better than Mark Walhberg, but it turns out that he’s pretty good at the action hero thing as well. Lou Diamond Phillips as Cisco was also a great casting choice, deftly walking this fine line between sleazeball, buffoon and psycho killer. Then you’ve got Christina Applegate as Pam the blonde Fran Drescher, Bokeem Woodbine as Crunch the local masturbation expert, Avery “The Sisko” Brooks as Paris the syndicate leader, and so on. Over-the-top and goofy, but there was never a moment where anyone slipped into full blown obnoxious territory for me, as it sometimes happens with me. Maybe the stuttering Malibu’s Most Wanted prototype, but he’s never on screen or in the film long enough for me to really dislike him. 

        The Big Hit’s greatest strengths, then, could also be considered its weakness. It’s a wacky action movie, so when it attempts to pull off romance (even though China Chow and Walhberg are capable of making it work) or anything with emotional depth it comes across as more satirical then it might have been intended. Similarly, someone used to slower pacing could find this movie exhausting; and the editing, while not as egregious as some modern action films, does have its hyperactive moments. Machine-gun cutting, if you will. Essentially this movie is going 75 on a 50 mph road, so if you’re not willing or able to match it, it’s going to leave you in the dust. 

      Ultimately I’m giving The Big Hit the recommendation. At first I thought it was going to be one of those 90s movies that folks rag on so much that they get a cult following, like Demolition Man (Wesley Snipes a producer on this film, by the by) or something, but it was actually just a straight-up enjoyable film with some damn good action sequences. If you liked films such as From Dusk Till Dawn or Baby Driver, then The Big Hit might be right up your alley. Pour yourself a nice cold glass of prune juice and enjoy.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2020: The Invisible Man (1933), directed by James Whale

 

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Invisible Man", by The Breeders

      This is something of a weird confession, but I don’t think I’ve ever read “The Invisible Man”. No, not the book by Ralph Ellison, although I should probably read that one too, but the work by British novelist and science fiction pioneer H.G. Wells. I was a pretty big fan of Wells’ work when I was a kid, readily absorbing works like “War of the Worlds” and “The Time Machine”, but I’m fairly certain I’ve only touched the first paragraph, first chapter at most, of his third most famous work. “The Stolen Bacillus” got in before “The Invisible Man”, to give some idea to those three people who get that reference, and to give some clarification to how weird one’s priorities can be at times. Does that work as an opening paragraph? I dunno.

      I say that partially to undercut my own credibility and also to lead into the remark that it seems like I’m not the only one who hasn’t read it. “The Invisible Man” is certainly known, but it seems like pop culture is more infatuated with the concept rather than the story. The Hollow Man franchise, Memoirs of an Invisible Man starring Chevy Chase, that one TV show in the 90s with the liquid metal effect, even Alan Moore uses an original character in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, as a serial rapist who is himself brutally raped to death (because how could you take him seriously as a writer if he didn’t sprinkle rape into every story he could). Not much at all in the way of proper adaptations compared to The Time Machine or Island of Dr. Moreau, although calling Marlon Brando’s interpretation of Moreau ‘proper’ might be doing a disservice to everyone’s favorite vivisectionist. So why not throw Herbert’s baby boy a bone and completely avoid the Invisible Man movie that’s supposed to be out this year to instead talk about a movie that’s almost 90 years old instead? If this blog is anything, it’s timely and relevant with its content.

      Released in 1933, with a screenplay by R.C. Sheriff and directed by blog patriarch James Whale, The Invisible Man was one of the earlier additions to Universal’s catalogue of genre-defining horror films. On a dark and snowy night in the sleepy town of Iping, a mysterious man enters the Lion-Head inn and tavern and rents a room, sparking a flurry of rumours from the townsfolk. This man, played/voiced by Claude Rains, is revealed in a roundabout way to be Jack Griffin, your average chemist’s assistant who disappeared under mysterious circumstances a few weeks prior. ‘Disappeared’ being the choice word here, as through the wonders of 1930s science Griffin has rendered himself completely invisible, and he’s having a hell of a time trying to figure out how to make himself un-invisible. It’s enough to drive someone absolutely insane, and as they always say, it’s the naked crazy guys that you can’t see that are the problem.

      The Invisible Man is a film of two minds. On one hand scenes like the ones in Iping, or where people are throwing around questions about how Griffin’s invisibility works, a lot of the more comedic moments feels in line with what you’d expect from the Wells story, but the rest feels like Universal trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole. Flora’s entire character feels like the most blatant example of a studio mandate I’ve seen lately, for example, that movies like this need some eye-candy to flaunt around so Invisible Man must have it too damn it. Except the women in those films were generally relevant to the plot, if only as cliche ‘damsels in distress’, and Flora isn’t even that. I have to assume that she was supposed to be this humanizing moment for Griffin, to show the man he once was and how far he’d fallen, but it never really feels legitimate because she has one conversation with the fucker in the whole movie. They even have the possibility of setting up a love triangle between her, Griffin and other assistant Kemp, but they completely sidestep that angle to make sure that you could completely excise those characters and that attempt at backstory and nothing would change. Considering that Dracula and Frankenstein weren’t 1:1 adaptations either, there’s really no excuse.

      There’s also some things on the technical side that are just weird. For example, there’s a scene early on in the film where a distraught Flora walks into another to moan about Griffin, and the Kemp comes in to be a creep. Rather than do something like have Flora rush offscreen, you hear a door slam, and then cut to the room with Kemp coming in, instead they do this one shot where they show Flora move into the room and Kemp follows her, but the camera is pulled back so far that you can see where the wall ends. I don’t know if that was supposed to be the architectural style of the time or if it’s something that came out in the transfer of the film to different aspect ratios, like how in the ‘remastered’ editions of Buffy the Vampire Slayer you can see the cameras and such, but for whatever reason it’s so distracting to me. Then later on in that same scene, we’re focused on Kemp and in your head your head you think it’s going to do a closeup on his face, maybe in frame with a flower for symbolic reasons, but instead the camera backs away until the scene ends with Kemp’s head peeking out of a large bush. It’s so weird looking! The rest of the movie is fine, so I don’t know if James Whale was sick that day or what, but man did they hit hard and heavy.

      Ultimately though, Universal movies live or die by their monster, and Claude Rains does not disappoint. He doesn’t have the iconic accent like Lugosi and Karloff, but he makes up for it with this overwhelming presence that makes you sit up and take notice. Doesn’t matter if he’s singing nursery rhymes or making megalomaniacal speeches, you believe in him completely. Honestly he’s almost too good for the part, like he should be running SPECTRE or fighting Superman, not berating middle-aged Irish women over unpaid rent. Not much else to say, it’s just a damn good voice.

      So Claude Rains, the small-town Brit silliness, and seeing the novel ways in which James Whale and crew tackle the ‘invisible man’ problem… I’d say that’s enough to warrant a recommendation. I wouldn’t say it’s a priority, if you’re only passing familiar with the Universal horror there are films you’ll want to check out first, but if you’re intrigued it’s barely over an hour long so no worries about a big time investment. Throw in Erle C. Kenton’s Island of Lost Souls and this year the H in H.G. Wells might just stand for Halloween.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2020: The Call of Cthulu (2005), directed by Andrew Leman

 

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "The Call of Ktulu", by Metallica

       Much like a one-hit wonder band will resent having to play that one song at every show concert they have, one wonders if H.P. Lovecraft’s mouldy ass were still alive if he would feel the same way about good ol’ Klooloo. Lovecraft had a large body of work after all, poems, short stories, none of which brought him any sort of critical and commercial appeal during his lifetime, and yet nowadays his entire being is now irrevocably caught up in some big green guy with an octopus for a head. Pretty wild for a monster whose sole appearance in the original canon was made up of one short story and a couple name drops in others, a throwaway character Lovecraft came up with as he churned out his weirdo potboilers. You never can tell what about your art people are going to latch onto, but as long as they latch onto it at all I suppose.

Cthulhu has appeared in comic books, video games, tabletop games, cartoons, anime, and even a song by Metallica, yet everyone’s favorite deathless octo-priest has been largely absent in the world of cinema. There was a film released in 2007 called Cthulhu, directed by Dan Gildark, and yet it seems to have been based on Lovecraft’s story the Shadow over Innsmouth, which doesn’t mention him at all as far as I can recall. For an actual Ktulu movie, not a movie where’s he referenced or name dropped but an actual (and as far as I know the only) film adaptation of the 1928 short story it seems the only game in town is The Call of Cthulhu, an indie film directed by Andrew Leman, written by Sean Banney and released in 2005. How an indie film managed to get on the ground floor of this before any of the major studios is beyond me, probably some intercompany dick measuring contest that I have no interest in, but it did and now here we are. Also, I didn’t feel like sitting through a big movie and this was only 46 minutes long, so let’s get started then.

If you’ve never actually read The Call of Cthulhu, which I assume is inversely proportional to the amount of people who’ve heard of Cthulhu, there’s not much to it. A man, we are not given his name, reveals to another man in conversation that he is dying, and that he wants the notes and paper’s he brought with him burned upon his passing. This collection of news articles, journals, and testimonials had been compiled by his recently deceased great uncle, following a meeting with Henry Wilcox, a young artist who had been plagued with bizarre, terrifying dreams. As the great-uncle, and by extension the man, and by greater extension the audience soon discover that this incident with Wilcox is only the tip of the iceberg. Horrific events seem to be cropping up all over the world, disasters, mass murders, human sacrifices by cults, and the two common elements to them all is a bestial idol and an equally hideous name: Cthulhu. In the sunken city of R'lyeh he sleeps, waiting for the day that he will wake and engulf humanity in a maelstrom of death and madness. Or has that day already arrived?

The main draw of The Call of Cthulhu is arguably the art direction, not only adapting the story but presenting it as a black & white silent era film, with those now all-too-familiar touches of German Expressionism. I’ve made mention of my fascination with silent films several times on this blog, most notably Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, but beyond my personal interest it’s an aesthetic that captures the feel of Lovecraft’s stories more than any other. After all, so much of the content of his work is rooted in that era, World War I, the popularity of scientific studies like Egyptology and paleontology and the rapid progress in technology, that even though Lovecraft himself didn’t care for the cinema (if being a colossal bigot didn’t tip you off that this guy wasn’t a laugh-riot) the dour, dreamlike atmosphere that we associate with silent films today is the exact same as that encapsulated by Nyarlathotep or The Color Out of Space. It is more ‘real’ because it feels ‘unreal’, in a manner of speaking.

      It is there, however, that we find my biggest issues with The Call of Cthulhu. In the excellent book Hitchcock/Truffaut director Alfred Htichcock lamented to some degree the introduction of sound in cinema because it irrevocably altered the nature of filmmaking. Not just in how we watch films, but in the way films themselves are constructed -- the way scenes are directed, the way narratives are written, whether they have a character talk or not, the spectre of sound still lingers somewhere in the corner of their mind. Such is the case with Call of Cthulhu, which clothes itself in the garb of a silent era film but is still steeped in modernity. Certain camera techniques, the abundance of cuts to dialogue boxes, things which a movie audience nowadays might not know or care about but become increasingly apparent. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was trying to tell a story, The Call of Cthulhu is trying to be Dr. Caligari on a budget, basically. Whether that was the intent of the filmmakers I can’t say, but that’s the impression I get.

      Of course the $25,000 question is: What did they do about Cthulhu? Is he in fact a squid, or rather a kid? Well, I’d say it’s so-so. I liked the build-up to his appearance, the island is both unsettling and grandiose on a scale the movie hadn't really been up to that point, and the score devolving into ambient and almost whispered screams was  a nice touch, but when he finally got on screen…? It was a novel way to do it, I’ll give them credit for that, but it’s also not scary. The line that always comes up when it comes to adapting Lovecraft is how are you supposed to depict a creature on screen that in the text is indescribable and drives you insane by looking at it, and the answer is that you don’t/can’t really, you just make something that an audience can believe would freak them out if they saw it in real life. Carpenter’s The Thing did it, the Silent Hill series of games did it, and there are ways that Call of Cthulhu could have done it that would have been far simpler and far less silly than what they ended up doing. It undercuts any tension that might have been built up and shatters the audience’s suspension of disbelief, because ‘anyone who is afraid of this thing must be a dipshit!’ Which might seem overly harsh, given the amont of movie monsters that look dumb as hell, but remember that we aren’t exactly swimming in Lovecraft movies. The Call of Cthulhu is the movie adaptation of the story at the moment, and as the pioneer I think there are certain expectations that come with that. Universal’s Dracula wasn’t 1:1 with the book, but when Bela Lugosi showed up you could feel it. You felt it when the Color showed up in The Color Out of Space in last year’s Marathon. Not so with Cthulhu, and when the name of the movie is The Call of Cthulhu, you’ve got a problem.

      With thoughts of the bustling cityscape of Metropolis or the orgiastic black sabbath in Haxan, I’m probably judging a little indie film with a gimmick a bit harshly. Because the source material is intriguing and said gimmick has such potential that the fact it misses the bar compared to what could have been hits so much harder than it might have otherwise. It doesn’t get the recommendation from me, but as I said it’s only 46 minutes, so if you do it’s not a huge investment. Much like real estate down in R’lyeh, I’d imagine.

Reelin' In the Years -- To Be or Not to Be (1942), directed by Ernst Lubitsch

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Polish Girl", by Neon Indian

       They often say that sequels can never hope to match the original, but then along came World War II. In terms of culture destroyed, of lives lost, of atrocities inflicted upon human beings WWII surpasses the ‘Great’ War in just about every way, not to mention the helmets looked a lot better. It was also the only war the United States has ever participated in that was morally justifiable, besides the one it had with itself to keep people from owning human beings as cattle, which is why it loves to bring it up so much. In literature, comic books, video games, music, theater, movies popular culture is brimming with stories taking place at or around World War II, both European and Pacific Theaters. The U.S. loves talking about how great they are for winning World War II that one wonders why it took them until several years after the war had begun before joining in. Maybe it had something to do with those American business tycoons that had to be stopped by law from collaborating with Nazis, a situation that I’m sure would never come up again in the future. Just spitballing here.

       There were films related to the war in one way or another since the war started, Chaplin’s The Great Dictator for example. However I didn’t want this block of movies completely centered around World War II, nor did I want to gloss over such a monumental event in history. So after many revisions, every year on this list has been changed at least once, I decided that 1942 would be as good a year as any. Potential inductees for this year included Hitchcock’s Saboteur, Orson Welles’ infamously butchered masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons, Disney classic Bambi, and the Lou Gehrig biopic The Pride of the Yankees. When it came to films related to the war though, there were three possible choices: Casablanca, William Wyler’s drama Mrs. Miniver, and something a little more light-hearted. I wonder which one I picked?

       Released in 1942 through United Artists, To Be or Not to Be was directed by Ernst Lubitsch and written by Melchior Lengyel and Edwin Justus Mayer. It’s 1939, and Adolf Hitler is walking the streets of Warsaw, Poland! Well not really, it’s just an actor from the Theater Polski acting troupe trying to prove a point. Yes, that Theater Polski, home to that famous actress Maria Tura (Carole Lombard), and her husband Joseph (Jack Benny) too I guess. A truer love you have never seen, but that doesn’t stop Maria from entertaining gentlemen callers like pilot Stanislav Sobinski (an incredibly young Robert Stack). Especially when it’s right in the middle of Joe’s big soliloquy in Hamlet. You know the one, ‘To Be or Not to Be’. 

     Before Sobinski can reveal the good news to Joseph however (to Maria’s chagrin), Germany decides some of Europe just isn’t enough and invades Poland, bombing Warsaw to the ground and placing Colonel Ehrhardt in control of the occupation. Some time later, Sobinski is a member of the Polish Squadron of the RAF when he uncovers a plot by Nazi spy Professor Siletsky to transfer military secrets to the Gestapo in Warsaw that could threaten the underground resistance movement in Poland and the entirety of Europe. Sobinski parachutes into occupied Warsaw in an attempt to stop Selitsky, but when the Turas get involved, suddenly things become far, far more complicated. Not to mention madcap.

       While largely unknown these days outside of the professional cinema fan, at one point in time Ernst Lubitsch was one of the biggest names in Hollywood. At a time when film discourse centered primarily around studios, Lubitsch was one of the people to establish the director as a unique creative voice in the filmmaking process. There was even a term coined for it, “The Lubitsch Touch”, in reference to the visual elegance he imparted to his films, in case you’re too lazy to check wikipedia. When Andrew Sarris was positing his Auteur Theory in regards to film, it was directors like Ernst Lubitsch that formed the basis for that theory.

       That ‘Lubitsch Touch’ is in full swing in To Be or Not to Be. You may not notice it at first, but the more you watch the more you realize the film looks good, in terms of set design and shot composition. Like you’ll have a scene outside and the piles of snow will be lit in just the right way, and the tree branches will bunch up just enough to provide the feeling of cover without obscuring the character, and the soldiers marching past on the right will coincide perfectly with the resistance fighter moving away on the left and the music rises and falls with what’s running through their mind and so on and on, Lubitsch’s visual language is so on point. Even the scenes showing Warsaw in ruins look beautiful, as if they were as lovingly crafted as the buildings they came from. It’s a film built around the theater, where fantasy and reality mix in unpredictable ways, and it seems to me like Lubitsch has taken that to its Shakespearean conclusion and made the world a stage for his characters to act upon. A reality that is purposefully not natural, it reminds me a bit of what Wes Anderson seeks to achieve in his films.

       Elegance visually is aided by a tight script and excellent performances by the cast. These people hit their lines so smooth you’d think they’ve been taking this show on the road in between takes. Stylistically I’d probably compare it to what Mel Brooks did decades later, although Brooks tended to be more broad, more about highlighting the gags rather than telling a story, whereas To Be gets most of its humor out through dialogue. Just about every member of the cast has a chance to throw out a handful of zingers or do a couple of skits, and they land much more often than they miss. Of all the comedy films we’ve covered up to this point I think this might be the one where the comedy has held up the best, it’s surprisingly fresh for the modern palate.

        In particular I’ve gotta give it up to Carole Lombard as Maria Tura. While Jack Benny is definitely the most direct comic actor in the film, Lombard indirectly is his equal.There are several times in the film where she’ll quickly slip in a line or use an certain inflection and it won’t even hit you until a second later just how good it was. Unfortunately her career was stunted by being typecast as a comedic actor, cemented by her tragic death (she died the year this movie released), but based on her performance here she deserves some respect on her name. After watching this film, she’s definitely one of those actors, like Grace Kelly, where I can 100% see where folks were coming from with that ‘Hollywood starlet’ label.

       If there were any criticism to be had, I suppose one could question the ‘cheeziness’ of the film, or the act of making jokes about the war during the war, and yeah there’s no way you’re going to confuse Jack Benny any of these folk as Polish, but honestly that cheeze is part of this film’s charm. The combination of this simple, storybook kind of sentimentality set against the often macabre is one I haven’t seen often, certainly not in the era of the absurdist post-war comedies of Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut. To Be mocks the Nazis, paints them as clowns, but it never fails to recognize that those who oppose Nazis are right and those who support them are wrong, and it never downplays the necessity of fighting them. Even Joseph Tura, who throughout the film is painted as something of a bumbler and a primadonna, steps up immediately to thwart Siletsky’s aims, and he refuses to rat out his friends even under the threat of death. They may back bite each other, they may toss a bit of gallows humor in from time to time, but there’s a optimistic core, a straight-forward morality that helps lift it up to something truly enjoyable, and if that’s considered ‘cheezy’ or sentimental then sign me up for more, because this world where everyone is mired in shit is dull as hell.

       This might be one of those cases where it seems like I’m blowing smoke up a movie’s ass, but I came into To Be or Not to Be with little to no expectations and I was surprised by just how much I enjoyed it. Maybe the stress of current events was affecting me more than I realized and watching this took a load off my mind or something to that effect. Either way it’s strongly recommended, and it’s gotten me interested in seeing more films that have the “Lubitsch Touch” in the future. Next stop on our tour we’re continuing our trip through the 1940s, and someone will finally be stepping out of the shadows and getting the attention they deserve.

Reelin' In The Years -- The Maltese Falcon (1941), directed by John Huston

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Something I Dreamed Last Night", by John Coltrane

       1941 is a year that will live in infamy, cinematically at least. The year that everything changed, or so film historians would have you believe. I’m talking of course about the release of Citizen Kane, a story of lost innocence, political and moral corruption, and some not that subtle digs at a certain newspaper magnate who may have helped manufacture consent for the Spanish-American War. The film that not only established Orson Welles as one of the great creative minds of the medium but has since gone on to be recognized as one of the greatest films ever made, right alongside Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Whether that title still holds up or if it’s just lip-service people make to sound cultured, the fact is when you think of ‘big’ movies, when you think of ‘important’ movies, Citizen Kane is one of those first names that come up. Even if you’ve never seen the movie, which is a distinct possibility in this day & age, chances are you still know the name Citizen Kane. Know it in the same way you know Star Wars, or Jaws, or King Kong.

So it would seem that Citizen Kane would be the natural choice for today’s stop, but I had actually already seen Citizen Kane some years ago and while I’ve recently been breaking with tradition and looking into reviewing movies that I’m familiar with, trying something new always takes priority. What to choose then? 1941 saw the release of two films by Alfred Hitchcock, Suspicion and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and Hitchcock films are always in contention. Universal released The Wolf Man, which would go on to become one of the premier names of the Universal Monsters line despite never transitioning into a proper franchise like Frankenstein or even The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Disney dropped Dumbo in 1941, but considering the current political climate covering a movie where a bunch of crows talk jive didn’t seem the correct move. Similar thinking went into the decision to pass on Kenji Mizoguchi’s The 47 Ronin; I’m going to be covering a Japanese film in this series, but you’ll have to wait until the postwar period to get it. No no no, it’s the 40s, so how about a little film noir? How about one of the most famous film noir movies ever made? That’ll work out just fine.

       Released in 1941 through Warner Bros., written and directed by John Huston in his directorial debut, The Maltese Falcon was actually the second film adaptation of the Dashiell Hammett story of the same name, the first having come out a decade prior directed by Roy Del Ruth and starring Ricardo Cotez and Bebe Daniels. Humphrey Bogart stars as Sam Spade, a private detective working in San Francisco with his partner Miles Archer. One day Spade is approached by a beautiful woman named Ruth Wonderly, looking to hire them to locate her sister Corinne, lured away from their home by a man named Floyd Thursby. They take the case, but what started out as a simple tailing job soon turns to tragedy when Archer is shot and killed by an unknown assailant, and then mystery when Thursby is murdered not too long afterwards. The cops suspect Spade, he had a job related to Thursby and a relationship related to Archer’s wife that places him at the top of the suspect list, but what is the truth? Who killed Archer and Thursby? Who is Ruth Wonderly, really? And what of the talk of this mysterious black bird, and the mysterious trail of death that seems to follow it wherever it goes? Where is the Maltese Falcon?

       Film noir, much like the Southern Gothic literature of William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, marks what I believe can be seen now as a maturation of the medium in the United States. Optimism and sentimentalism stripped away to reveal the underbelly of humanity; Gangsters, thug cops, femme fatales and hardboiled detectives. So it is here in The Maltese Falcon: Sam Spade is our protagonist but he is not a noble or heroic figure. He’s cynical, condescending philanderer who has no problem manipulating people to get what he wants, but because he has a certain set of ethics he operates under he stands aparts from the antagonists, thus drawing the support of the audience. We may not like him as a person, but we respect his search for the truth.

       Yet another feather in the cap for Humphrey Bogart, who was only a year away from blowing up Hollywood with Casablanca, who really exemplifies that sort of duality that I implied in the above paragraph. Handsome but haggard, charismatic but acerbic, you can tell pretty easily why Bogart was once considered one of the coolest men in Hollywood. He’s helped by a damn good supporting cast; Mary Astor as the duplicitous damsel in distress Ruth Wonderly, long-time Bogart bud Peter Lorre as the shady Joel Cairo (I don’t know if Lorre has ever played a character that wasn’t shady), and Sydney Greenstreet as the boisterous and dastardly Kasper Gutman in not only his film debut, but the role which granted him his sole Academy Award nomination in his all-too-short career (he lost, like so many others, to the horror that was How Green Was My Valley). Four very distinct people with four very distinct personalities that play off each other well, and really elevate what is already great writing. A lot could be learned about characterization from this film, both literal and visual.

       As mentioned before this is the directorial debut of John Huston, who had been a screenwriter since 1930 and would go on to write, direct and act in such films as The Treasure of Sierra Madre, Moby Dick and The Man Who Would Be King until his death in 1987. Up until this point I had never seen a film by John Huston, so I can’t speak to any stylistic choices that would place him amongst the auteurs, although since he wrote/co-wrote and directed a whole bunch of his films I think he’d be considered an auteur either way. I will say that The Maltese Falcon is directed well, moves along quickly but the mystery has a good build and the film never feels rushed. Not very adventurous in terms of cinematography, although there is one shot at the end that I like, but with the writing and the acting it doesn’t really need it.

       The only thing about The Maltese Falcon that rubs me the wrong way is the score. Now I’ve been around film noir enough to know that the genre’s connection to jazz music is far less prevalent than pop culture would have you believe, but the orchestral score used here feels off to me. Too peppy at times, even downright goofy. Half the time you aren’t sure whether you’re watching a highlight of Hollywood’s Golden Age or an episode of Leave It to Beaver. The Maltese Falcon is less overtly violent than other film noir so they can kind of get away with it, but there are definitely scenes where the music is very noticeable. Scenes that would normally have a light degree of levity suddenly threaten whimsy, and I don’t know if Bogart can pull off whimsy.

       The Maltese Falcon is not only a good movie, it’s a pioneer for the hundreds of films, books, comics, cartoons that followed in the years hence. Where Citizen Kane’s elephantine reputation might scare some modern moviegoers away, or at least cause them to put it off for special occasions, The Maltese Falcon is supremely watchable; Put it on wherever, whenever, and you’re probably going to have a good time. It gets the recommendation. Next time on our tour, I guess we’ll take a look at that whole World War II thing everyone’s talking about. We’re not doing Casablanca though, so don’t even ask.

Reelin' In The Years -- The Grapes of Wrath (1940), directed by John Ford

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Dust Bowl Blues", by Woody Guthrie

       Man, quite the eventful couple of months, huh? A lot of bad stuff going on, so bad that something like sitting down to write shitty little movie reviews seemed silly. Wasteful, even. Still I suppose we all need a distraction from time to time, a little levity to break one out of that depressive spiral, even if you have to force yourself a little. Our stop today is 1940; The world has been plunged back into war, it’s biggest yet in fact, and the U.S. has yet to officially throw its hat in the ring, perhaps because they were so flattered that Hitler named one of Germany’s then-biggest trains after it. Nazis were super into that whole Manifest Destiny thing you see, and Jim Crow? Don’t even get them started, they’d probably name their kids Crow if it didn’t remind them of something that wasn’t white. That being said, when it came time to pick the representative for 1940 the competition turned out to be pretty damn fierce. Charlie Chaplin’s antifascist masterpiece The Great Dictator immediately came to mind, but since I had already seen it years ago I ended up going with Modern Times. Hitchcock made his annual appearance with Rebecca, which earned him first Best Director nomination, but it’s still not his time yet. Disney dropped two movies that year, Pinocchio and the audio-visual spectacle Fantasia, but at the time I already had an animated film set up for a later year. The Thief of Baghdad was actually the representative for a while, but because I decided to take a break from genre film in this series it eventually got wiped away in one of the many list revisions. The Proud Valley, starring the great Paul Robeson was also in there for a hot minute, and His Girl Friday might have had a chance if It Happened One Night hadn’t fucked up the romcom for everybody. No, at a time like this, when there are people angry and suffering and miserable, it only makes sense to do a movie about people who are angry and suffering and miserable. Escapism? Never heard of it.

Released in 1940, screenplay by associate producer Nunnally Johnson, The Grapes of Wrath was directed by John Ford, pillar of the Western genre, and of course was based on the novel of the same name by John Steinbeck, oft-considered one of the great American novels. Henry Fonda plays Tom Joad, a sharecropper’s son that has finally returned to the family farm in Oklahoma after a stint in jail for homicide (in self-defense), only to find out there isn’t a family farm anymore. The Dust Bowl has run through the Midwest, devastating thousands of acres of farmland, which has led to government-enforced mass evictions of folk from their homes. With the local economy dead in the gutter and little other options, the Joad family (along with the disillusioned ex-preacher Casy) is forced to pack up and head west for California and the promise of work. It’s a long way from Oklahoma to California for just a promise though, and unfortunately the Joad’s are going to learn the hard way that hopes and dreams  don’t often translate to reality.

John Ford is a director that I known of for years, and yet up until watching this film I was reticent about checking out his work, because he was so often connected with those old-school Westerns (which always looked stodgy and uninteresting to me compared to the Italian stuff) and John ‘The Native Americans Deserved to Die’ Wayne. Did not appeal to me whatsoever. Yet for as much criticism as I could give Ford for his reputation as ‘America’s Filmmaker’ I have to give him credit for adapting a story that so thoroughly strips away the illusions of America. The myth of the American Dream? The myth of America being this land of opportunity, of moral uprightness, where good things happen to those who put their noses to the grindstone and work for it. Bunk. The reality is that if you’re poor then you have no opportunities. The reality is that if the people who control the jobs decide to not give you a job, then tough luck, I guess your children get to starve. The reality is if the pittance they give you isn’t enough to live on and you speak up about it, they have no problem bringing in a couple thugs with badges to cave your skull in under the pretense of you being an ‘agitator’. The reality is when you’re poor, when you can’t work or can’t find work, you cease being a human being; You’re an ‘Okie’, a ‘transient’, a ‘migrant’, an eyesore that the ‘normal’ god-fearing public would rather just disappear altogether. Steinbeck’s story is about the endurance of the human spirit in the face of hopelessness, of the righteous fury of the just when faced with injustice, and I think Ford captures those feelings in his adaptation. Pretty damn good for a first impression.

First impressions also tell me that Ford isn’t that adventurous of a filmmaker. There’s not much in the way of cinematography or shot composition, he’s not trying to impress, he’s telling the tale about as straightforward as you can get. That’s not necessarily a good thing, I think he glosses over some scenes that should be treated more dramatically for the sake of pushing the story forward, but at the same time I appreciate Ford’s simple approach. When you’ve got dozens of people, men, women and children, marching in order off to the fields to pick peaches for 7 cents a crate you don’t need much to convey what the audience should be feeling. About the only thing I’ll really dig him for in this regard is a scene near the beginning with Tom and Casy where it’s you can clearly tell it’s a soundstage, like you can hear John Carradine’s voice bouncing off the walls, but you can’t really fault a film for being made in a film studio, especially in the 40s. I do think the scene near the end with Tom and Ma Joad is framed rather well, and you do get some wide open scenery which I understand is a Ford staple, so don’t let it be said Ford is doing rote filmmaking stuff, but it’s definitely not a flashy film. .

The cast is quite good, not as star-laden as is Hollywood’s tendency, but effective all the same. Henry Fonda might be a little too Hollywood to pull off being the son of a destitute farmer, a bit too handsome to be really rugged and I don’t believe he has much of a vocal range, but it does look like he could beat your ass and work a field after so you could do worse for leading. John Carradine is great as the ex-preacher Jim Casy, cast adrift both physically and spiritually, and I wish we got to see more of him. Jane Darwell isn’t just Ma Joad, the emotional pillar upon which the Joad family rests, I think everyone can see a bit of their mom. The rest of the Joad family don’t get quite as much attention, arguably even underdeveloped (Rosie I’d say gets the worst of it) but Ford does devote enough time so that you know who these people are and by the end you’re invested in their pursuit of happiness. Or at least their pursuit of not starving to death.

One thing that I definitely wasn’t a fan of was in regards to the score. While I agree with the use of folksy, jug-band music, the type you’d expect poor Oklahoman sharecroppers to listen to, it’s too upbeat for the movie it’s in. I’d go as far to say that it’s tone-deaf to what Ford is trying to portray on screen. It’s not like folk music is devoid of morose songs, where the hell do you think the blues came from after all, and so one would think that if you’re making a movie dealing with such heavy topics you’d want music that matches the emotional context of the film, rather than something you’d hear in the background of your local hootenanny. Luckily the most powerful moments of the film are done without music at all, but I still don’t agree with the decision.

Also, while Ford captures the essence of the novel in his adaptation, it does feel like a lot of the novel was trimmed down for that adaptation. As I wrote earlier it looks like the movie is building up to something with Rosie, but abruptly ends before it can pay it off. Hell, from watching this movie you’d never know why the story is called The Grapes of Wrath, because I don’t think you ever see a single fruit at all, despite the driving force of the film revolving around it. Unfortunately I haven’t read the novel, but I do know that there are some things there that were not present in the film, for reasons of brevity or because they were risque for the movie audiences of the 40’s. Best to stick with travel montages instead.

The Grapes of Wrath is not a movie without flaws, but it’s still a good movie, with a message that is just as relevant now as it was back then, perhaps even more. Easily, and strongly, recommended. Don’t start packing up your bags yet though, because we’re going to be knee deep in the 1940’s for the time being. Coming up next time, a bonafide bucket list movie that you’ve probably seen referenced dozens of times, but perhaps have never actually seen.

Reelin' In The Years -- Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), directed by Michael Curtiz

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Angels With Dirty Faces", by Sham 69

       If the pop culture of the 1950s were built on aliens and rocket ships, then the pop culture of the 30s (and part of the 40s) were built on gangsters and Thompson submachine guns. Ever since Prohibition had made crime a lucrative business, and organized crime started to assert itself more and more into public affairs, so too did those who committed such crimes become public figures  Al Capone, Bugsy Siegel, John Dillinger, names that sent thrills and chills through the hearts of the U.S., just as the stories of Billy the Kid and other outlaws had done years prior, only far more ubiquitous. From the way pop culture told it,you couldn’t walk two feet with bumping into the mob; The Shadow was bumping them off on the radio, Mike Hammer was running up against them in the pulps, Batman was facing off against them in the comics, and of course there were scores and scores of gangsters, mobsters, hitmen and other assorted goons in the theaters and film serials. So much gangster stuff that you might think that the U.S. government was funding it in order to have an easy scapegoat to blame the ills of society. Surely they wouldn’t do something that underhanded, right?

       As has been the case since we’ve moved into the sound era, there were plenty of potential films we could have covered for 1938. Of course there’s the obligatory Alfred Hitchcock with The Lady Vanishes, but Alfie’s gonna have to wait for a couple more years. Errol Flynn appeared in two vehicles that year, The Dawn Patrol and the much more famous The Adventures of Robin Hood, but I had seen a review of the latter recently and I like to keep my mind fresh. I might have done Bringing up Baby, Howard Hawks’ romantic comedy starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, but that business with It Happened One Night left me with a sour taste in my mouth. I also gave serious consideration to Norman Taurog’s Boys Town, starring Spencer Tracy and a young Mickey Rooney.  Yet in the end I decided I wanted to get to at least one gangster movie on this tour; not a mystery movie involving gangsters, which I’m sure we’ll get to once we hit film noir territory, and not movies that happened to feature gangsters like The Big House, but a straight up potboiler crime movie. Which I did.

       That film was Angels with Dirty Faces, released in 1938, written by John Wexley and Warren Duff, based on a story by writer-director Rowland Brown, and directed by the prolific Michael Curtiz, who also directed the aforementioned Adventures of Robin Hood, Casablanca, Mildred Pierce and many other films. Back in the day there were no two greater friends than Rocky Sullivan and Jerry Connelly, two rough ‘n’ tumble street kids who spent their days smoking cigs, teasing girls and doing crimes. One day however while attempting to steal some fountain pens for some easy profit the boys are set upon by the cops and Rocky is shipped off to reform school, thus altering the course of the two boy’s lives. 15 years later, Rocky (played by James Cagney) is now a free man and has returned to his old neighborhood in order to reconnect with his pal Jerry (Pat O’Brien), who is now a priest watching over the next generation of hooligans (played by the troupe of child actors known as The Dead End Boys). However Rocky is also one of the most notorious gangsters in the city, and part of the reason he’s there is to collect the 100,000 dollars he lent out to his lawyer James Frazier (Humphrey Bogart) as well as his cut of the action. Rocky is a charming guy, winning the hearts of not only the kids of the neighborhood, and yet his lust for power and riches sets him at odds with the morally righteous Jerry, leading them towards a conclusion that will once again affect the course of their lives forever.

       Gangster movies are often criticized for glorifying the criminals they center around. Just look at the explosive popularity of Brian de Palma’s remake of Scarface, whose main character is a murderous, drug-dealing psychopath. I don’t think that criticism is without reason, yet I think the opposite also tends to be quite prevalent; That criminals are subhuman creatures who exist only to be cannon fodder for our gun-toting protagonist. What I like about Angels with Dirty Faces, then, is that it’s a very human film. Rocky Sullivan is not a good guy; He has no problem with using intimidation and violence to get what he desires and so do the people around him, and he’s pretty damn good at it. Yet at the same time he’s not completely bad either; You can see the goodness in him and how he tries to help the people important to him in his own way. Similarly, although Jerry is in the right he’s not self-righteous about; He opposes Rocky’s actions but he doesn’t damn him or attack him for it, he understands how his friend became the way he is and wants to make sure that others don’t follow the same path. In that way Angels with Dirty Faces becomes less of an action-packed gangster film and more like a tragic drama where two friends and pushed against each other by forces beyond their control. Which I think is the way to go about it, rather than just ‘watch these people do bad stuff until they’re killed by some cops’.

       What really sells that idea, and the movie really, is the casting of James Cagney as Rocky Sullivan. These days Cagney is less known as an actor and more of a voice people pull out when they want to do an ‘old timey gangster’ voice, much like Edward G. Robinson, but seeing him here it’s easy to see why he became such an iconic figure. He’s got this chameleonic presence about him that allows him to shift between boyish charm and cold-blooded killer at the drop of a hat, encapsulating perfectly the ‘street kid forced to grow up too early and too hard’ nature of Rocky’s character. Quite exaggerated, especially when put up against more passive characters, but never to the point where it becomes buffoonish, like Pacino in Dick Tracy. The rest of the cast is good, obviously Bogart is putting in work, Pat O’Brien plays a good stoic, Ann Sheridan doesn’t get much but I liked what I saw, and I was also a bit surprised at how much I liked the Dead End Kids, (I’m a big fan of old New York street tough stereotypes I guess), pretty amazing that they managed to get a respectable film career off of one performance in a play years ago. Yet above all it’s Cagney that this film is built upon and Cagney that the audience’s eye is drawn towards, just as it was with Bogart in Casablanca a few years later.

       On a technical level, Angels is a well-constructed film but not an especially flashy one. I did like how several shots near the end were composed though, I thought they were blocked very well and I liked the use of shadows and darkness. The score provided by Max Steiner was much the same, good as well as unobtrusive to the story. I never really recognized Michael Curtiz as a director before, despite having seen Casablanca prior, but now having seen those films and reading up on his biography a bit it seems like he was a genuine craftsman of a filmmaker. You’re not going to see Lawrence of Arabia style flash & spectacle out of him it seems like, but he will give you just enough in order to tell the story. He’d have to be sparing too, since he was putting out six movies a year at one point. Makes all these modern directors look a bit lazy, don’t it?

       Ultimately, Angels with Dirty Faces gets the recommendation. I was hesitant to get to this film at first to be honest, expecting it to be the simplistic cops & robbers kind of movie I mentioned earlier and that I’d have to force myself to fill out the by-now standard 3 page, but I was pleasantly surprised that there was actually some meat on that bone. It’s not just a movie about violence and so on but about its effects, not just on an individual level but on one’s community. Glad I watched it. On the next stop of our tour we’ll be moving into the 1940’s, a decade of bloodshed and human misery, and we’ll be doing it with some of the biggest names of that era. As well as one of the biggest books.