JACKIE COLLINS MEMORIAL FILM FESTIVAL: Part 3 - THE BITCH

I have a couple of fairly reliable rules of cinema - bellwethers one might say - that let you know you are probably in for a real stinker.  The first is Eight Word Title.  If there are eight or more words in the title, look out.  The second is TBC - Tits Before Credits.  If you see 'em before they roll the title and opening credits, you are probably seeing the best part of the movie right there.  My first rule clearly does not apply to The Bitch (1979), Joan Collins' second appearance as her sister Jackie's character Fontaine Khaled.  The second rule is applicable beyond all expectation, as she is in a naked sex scene in the shower before the credits.

The Bitch is a shabby sexploitation flick and nothing more.  The previous films in this exercise were competently enough made that I never even wondered who was responsible for their existence, and the screenplays were by Jackie Collins herself so they at least had a little sharpness to them.  When I saw how poor this production was I determined it was either from very early in a filmmaker's brief and unsuccessful career, or it was made by someone with a decades-long string of cheap mediocrities attached to his name.  The latter proved to be the case. Look it up if you like - his career is a remarkably consistent pattern of shoddy crap, ending with one of the saddest, poorest mummy movies in the history of the cinema.  He wrote the incoherent and inconclusive screenplay and I nearly feel motivated to try to read the book just to see what a botch he made of the original story.  Plotwise, after her brief temporary comeuppance in The Stud, the protagonist is left to her own resources to get her failing disco back on top of the scene again.  There is some guy with a stolen diamond.  Stuff happens.  She wears this dreadful metallic ensemble.

Everything is pretty much in a long medium shot - most of the time you see everyone from the waist up, whether they are yelling at each other on a disco dance floor or walking down the street. The lifelessness of the filming is noteworthy.  The disco scenes are made tedious by there being two basic shots - the medium shot and the camera on a skateboard looking up shot.  The sex scenes are longer than the disco scenes and are meant to be erotica as they involve a lot of writhing around in darkness.  The peak of decadence comes at a pool party with extensive underwater shots reminiscent of the cheap nudies of Doris Wishman, one of the most consistently shoddy directors of all time who nonetheless was able to make her nudies moderately interesting.  The Bitch is not.  This morning I could hardly remember anything about it.  I remembered this though.

Yes, the thing I remembered most clearly about this sex and disco movie is the crappiness of this driving scene.  That is her in a car.  I always enjoy those brief amateurish film reviews that go, "This is the WORST MOVIE EVER MADE.  Whatever you do, DO NOT WATCH THIS MOVIE."  Of course there is no such thing as the worst movie ever made.  This, however is a piece of crap and a complete waste of time.  There are not drugs enough in this world to make it enjoyable or interesting. 

This concludes the Jackie Collins Memorial Film Festival.  Judging by the first two, I got a good idea of the kind of story she wrote, and if you like that kind of trashy lurid sex novel then she is just the stuff.  Harold Robbins for the ladies.  Her job here is finished, and so is mine.  I thank you.

JACKIE COLLINS MEMORIAL FILM FESTIVAL: Part 2 - THE STUD

The Stud (1978) is a story of the sexual objectification and degradation of manly hunk Tony Blake (Oliver Tobias), and the instrument of his destruction is the sex monster Fontaine Khaled (Joan Collins).  Fontaine is the trophy wife of a wealthy absentee  husband, and owner of the posh disco of which Tony is manager and on-call sex servant.  The male chauvinist ideal of unlimited sex with an endless variety of partners is turned into a job, a chore, a misery and at last a torment before the story is told. Tony is eventually drowning in a nightmarish sea of women, passed from one pair of lips to the next, a sex object to be used and tossed away. The nudity is not merely gratuitous, it is excessive; even I began to wish some of them would just keep their kit on.  Fontaine is a repulsive creature who becomes quite nasty when she is forced to think about, talk about, or do anything other than sex, with a shiny mask-like face from which cutting barbs smoothly issue.  All major characters get very naked quite a lot, and the first half of the picture alternates among that, some excellent disco scenes, and people talking out the plot.  Here's Joan Collins naked with her obligatory sardonic Greek Chorus friend.

 

Like the sex, the plot was beginning to become rather tiresome, and I was mainly waiting for more disco, when everything veers off into surrealism.  Tony begins popping pills at the Aquatic Parisian Orgy Palace, the background music turns into discordant squawks and drones, and it becomes an echoing nightmare of debauchery as Tony reaches the depth of degradation - DUPED INTO GAY SEX.  That motif appeared in Married Men as well, a major character who uses sex to succeed realizing her ultimate degradation when she is DUPED INTO GAY SEX.  In the '70s, homosexuality equals self-hatred.  There are still greater depths to plumb as Tony attempts to flee his fate in the pleasantest part of the movie for me, a lovely driving sequence through damp grey Britain in a red convertible with the radio aerial bent into the shape of a heart. 

Yes, my favorite part of the sex movie was the driving scene.  Alas, he is driving to greater humiliation as odd man at a tedious weekend in a vast stuffy country house, from which he is ejected to huddle unshaven at his parents' working-class flat and queue in the cold at a telephone box trying to hustle the deal that will reverse his fortunes.  But it is only when our hopes and dreams are crushed before our eyes that we can understand the true meaning of freedom.  My feeling throughout was that this movie suffered from too much budget.  Married Men had a parsimonious quality that distanced it from reality, while The Stud seems very much rooted in this actual world.  It was not quite an enjoyable experience unless you enjoy cringe-inducing grappling scenes that seem more like a fight than romance, with affection reduced to a formality - a token to be paid as part of the ritual of animalistic humping.  I am not big on sex scenes in the first place but some of this got to be downright teeth-gritting.  I still have another entire movie of soulless sex monster Fontaine Khaled to enjoy before this insane ordeal ends.  And here is the trailer.

JACKIE COLLINS MEMORIAL FILM FESTIVAL: Part one

The World is Full of Married Men (1979) is based on Jackie Collins' first novel, and there is hardly a believable thing in it. I love a movie that abandons reality from the first moment, and found that watching this was far less of an ordeal than I expected and was generally quite enjoyable all the way through.  Carroll Baker is a competent actress and I have enjoyed quite a few of her offbeat Italian and Spanish-made psychological thrillers from the late '60s and early '70s - because of the movies, not necessarily because she brought anything outstanding to them.  Here she is credible as Linda Cooper, a gullible upscale hausfrau whose young daughters have perfectly posh British accents despite their American parents and Swedish nanny.  What is less credible is that she should be the object of instant attraction to handsome young disco crooner Gem Gemini, seen here in the obligatory hairy leather coat, as Linda's sardonic Greek Chorus of a friend (Georgina Hale) feigns inattention.

Tony Franciosa is also a competent actor, who plays his role of a ludicrous personification of The Double Standard on the very brink of slapstick.  "Oh THAT girl!" he unctuously replies, referring to the girl he was screwing in the bathroom at the party, "I can EXPLAIN that!"  His utter obliviousness is the most entertaining thing in this, and his immaculate disco 'fro continuously pleases the eye.

There are far more laughs in this film than were originally intended, up to and including the "shocker" ending.  It has enough melodrama and sexual egalitarianism for the Ladies, and enough gratuitous nudity (if scrawny stick-figures are to your taste) and general lewdness for the Gentlemen.  It also has enough disco to stick it all together into a glutinous mass of garish amusement.  Buy the soundtrack on Ronco records.  Really.  Overall, it is a moderately entertaining bit of lurid trash which takes less time to experience than reading the book, which is a strong argument in its favor.

ONE UP ON IMDB

Maybe you are old enough, or have watched enough old TV shows, to know who Gale Gordon was.  He was best known for his roles as eternally flustered and flabbergasted authority figures opposite Lucille Ball on The Lucy Show and Eve Arden on Our Miss Brooks.  He also played Dennis the Menace's foil Mister Wilson for the final two seasons of the show, and had recurring roles in Make Room for Daddy and a number of other programs.  During the '30s and '40s he worked primarily in radio drama which is unfortunately not as definitively chronicled as video.  IMDb lists his first film appearance as an uncredited role as radio announce in the 1933 comedy Elmer the Great.  Yet here he is in a momentary appearance with Rochelle Hudson in Is My Face Red? (1932).  I may not be the first person to notice this but I am the first to make a big deal about what a hot-shot he is for doing so.  Take that, Internet Movie Database, you don't know everything.

Lady Detective Holiday - WHILE THE PATIENT SLEPT

While the Patient Slept (1935) - It's a dark and stormy night in the mansion and the family vultures are gathering to watch the old man die.  Everybody is half hysterical by nature, everybody has got some kind of angle, and they all have their claws into each other.  There is something to do with a missing twin brother and a green figurine of an elephant.  Nurse Sarah Keate, played by Aline MacMahon, has been called in to supervise the coma.  Aline MacMahon and her eyebrows.  Her archingly elevated eyebrows.  She is a fine figure of a woman, but those eyebrows are her best feature.  Just look at them.

When the most hated relative is gunned down in the middle of the night on the main stairway, it's time to call in the law, in the form of blustering Detective Lance O'Leary (Guy Kibbee) and his ridiculous sidekick (Allen Jenkins).

From then on it's a lot of nocturnal rambling, shouted questions, the whole mob gathered in the living room, lightning flashing, a mysterious silhouette, a groping hand.  Look out, Nurse Sarah, look out for that groping hand!

This is the first of five movies based on the Nurse Sarah Keate novels of Mignon G. Eberhart.  It is based on the second of those novels and the first of them wasn't made into a movie until later.  The weird thing is that as soon as Keate and O'Leary meet, they act like they have worked on many a crime before, and the sidekick blurts out, "Every time there's a murder SHE pops up," which makes you think, what the hell, did I miss some other Nurse Sarah Keate movie that came before this?  But no you did not.  It's a ploy.  Five different movies made by two different studios, played by four different actresses and given three different names, that is the score for the literary Nurse Keate.  You can look it up if you want to know the whole deal.  This one is a well-produced B movie, good as these things go.  Naturally she is the one who finds the most clues and gets into the most peril from the mysterious figure with the groping hand, but you have to ignore the usual number of inexplicable instances of people covering for each other and not telling what they know and saying something happened when it didn't or didn't happen when it did, and finding out the butler has a criminal record but what does that have to do with anything.  Don't they always have a criminal record just to throw things off?  It's a mild way to fill the bill - did they put these before the main feature so you would have to sit through them, or after so you could bail out?  I don't know. 

Lady Detective Holiday - ADVENTURES OF KITTY O'DAY

Adventures of Kitty O'Day (1944) stars the mildly attractive, yet strangely forgettable, Jean Parker as the hotel switchboard operator who reads detective magazines and listens in on people's calls, so she naturally overhears a murder.  She is not so much a detective as a nosy meddler, and this is not so much a mystery as it is a farce of the vanishing corpse variety.  The story is so unimportant to the film that it is left to a brief unintelligible explanatory monologue at the end, but nobody in it or watching it gives a damn who did what to who and why.  Directed by world champion hack William Beaudine, this is a formulaic stand-in for a detective story, just as the characters are formulaic stand-ins for real people.  They are types - the nosy meddler, her frustrated boyfriend, the vamp, the overdressed older woman, the angry police detective and his absurd sidekick.  The types are played by actors who fit the role and who can get the job done as quickly as possible.  I knew when I saw Parker that I had seen her before a bunch of times but couldn't remember where or when.  I am still having trouble remembering her name.  Here she is with ever-present Byron Foulger, doing his bit as desk clerk.

Parker had a career of over 30 years with numerous starring roles, almost entirely in B movies.  She was in a few notable films, such as Little Women (1933) and Laurel and Hardy's Flying Deuces (1939), but mostly appeared in anything that needed someone to be The Girl opposite a handsome action man; adequately entertaining minor productions like No Hands on the Clock (1941) and Wrecking Crew (1942) with Chester Morris and Alaska Highway (1943) with Richard Arlen.

The only contact this movie has with the outside world is a couple of references to the "manpower shortage," which pops up a lot in movies from this period of the war.  Even its brief "outdoor" scenes consist of one tiny set with two park benches and some shrubbery. A cultural note of minor interest is one of the few film appearances of  Shelton Brooks, seen here as Jeff the Custodian along with what's his name who did something or other in the movie.  Brooks was an old time minstrel and vaudevillean, who composed the standard Dark Town Strutters' Ball, and Sophie Tucker's signature tune Some of These Days.

I think I have made it pretty clear that there is not much to this - the second half devolves into a lot of chasing around and everyone eventually goes down the laundry chute, but in the part that relies on dialogue between a few people standing in an unnatural arc roughly facing the camera, it has some laughs.  It is mostly inoffensive, and that is sometimes enough.

Lady Detective Holiday - MURDER ON A HONEYMOON

Murder on a Honeymoon (1935) is the third and last of Edna May Oliver's appearances as spinster detective Hildegarde Withers and it couldn't be more different from the feeble effort which followed it.  Capably directed by Lloyd Corrigan (a unique instance of a director who dropped the megaphone and went into screenwriting and an extended career as a character actor) and co-written by Robert Benchley so you know at least there are going to be some good lines in it, it looks like they tried.  All pretense at the schoolteacher setting is dropped as Hildegarde is on vacation in California.  On a short seaplane hop to Catalina Island, in itself a great way to start a picture, the most irritating passenger sickens and dies.  It appears that he was a witness against the mob, and that it was murder, and that Inspector Oscar Piper must hop out from New York to take charge of the investigation.  That business out of the way, we may settle down to a fairly pleasant entertainment that keeps one's interest and even has a few mild surprises before it satisfactorily ends. 

While the story is adequate it is the sharp dialogue and interaction of Oliver and Gleason that provides the interest here.  The RKO studio had a good thing going with these two and it was only because she signed with MGM, probably for more money and less work in classier pictures, that this series didn't peter out at the usual pace for such things.  Since I have just viewed the dismal production which followed this, comparisons are inevitable, but the main thing is that in Murder on a Bridle Path it seems like they didn't even bother to try.  Here they spent some money on it, with much of the action filmed on location on Catalina Island.  Oliver maintains the frumpy sardonic schoolmarm nature of the character as compared to the aging socialite portrayed by Helen Broderick.  You can imagine having cocktails in Broderick's apartment but with Oliver a handshake at the door and sincere thanks for a pleasant evening will suffice.

A secondary character in the plot is played by Lola Lane who has a lot of charisma, which makes up to some degree for her lack of subtlety as an actress.  It seems as if there were more to her part than appears now, as it's a bit disjointed and meaningless - it never really contributes anything of value to the story. I enjoyed her in Port of Lost Dreams (1934), Death from a Distance (1935) and the serial Burn 'em up Barnes (1935).  I bring her up because here is something that maybe you didn't know.  In 1938 she appeared as the girl reporter Torchy Blane (usually played by Glenda Farrell) in Torchy Blane in Panama, inspiring the name and character of girl reporter Lois Lane in Superman comics the following year.  So that is where that came from.

It's not the greatest thing you have ever seen by any means, but it is well made, doesn't put you to sleep, and gets a little bit exciting before it ends, and that's all anyone can reasonably expect from this sort of thing.  You come away from it saying that wasn't bad at all.  Except maybe for the fact that Willie Best was still being billed as Sleep 'n' Eat. That's bad.

A Lady Detective Holiday: MURDER ON A BRIDLE PATH

Lady Detectives seem to be standard fare in these enlightened times, but they were few and amateur back in olden days.  Single girls or spinsters, schoolmarms or nurses, they found themselves fortuitously on the scene of a murder presided over by their old acquaintance, the blustering boob of a cop.  Spotting with their female eye for detail the vital clue, they consistently save the ass of their grudgingly grateful foil and step back into obscurity when the flashbulbs start popping, as a lady ought to do.

Murder on a Bridle Path (1936) is the middle "gem" in the diadem of films featuring Stuart Palmer's accidental sleuth Miss Hildegarde Withers. Played here by acerbic Helen Broderick, it bodes ill from the start with two directors named in the credits.  With a ten day cheapie like this, that probably means somebody quit or got bumped to another project and the other guy finished up.  Neither of them, and they shall be nameless here, had much to show for themselves as directors and they spent most of their time as assistant directors and editors.  It shows.  I have seen the first two Withers movies in which she is well-represented by the immaculately spinsterish Edna May Oliver, and while they are never more than standard fare, the chemistry between Oliver and her foil, Police Inspector Oscar Piper played by irascible James Gleason, provides most of the viewing value.  Here, not so much.

When an unpleasant young socialite is struck down in Central Park, clearly an accident,  up pops Hildegarde to complicate matters by pointing out the evidence that is right in front of them all.  Then a bunch of stuff happens and they go places and talk to people, Willie Best does his chagrin-inducing schtick, Dewey Robinson pops in with his giant eyebrows for one scene, and suddenly you find out who did it and it is over.  I don't often say this, but this movie stinks.  I like Helen Broderick, but all she does is pop off shots at Gleason and pick up scraps of paper that turn out to be valuable clues.  Most of these cheapies try to build mystery by having everybody talk about everything, but in this one nobody talks about anything and it is all suddenly pulled out of a hat and the killer suddenly goes through a railing at the top of the stairwell and you're done.  I lured the wife into watching this and she nodded off after ten minutes, finally bailing out one minute before the killer was revealed and she didn't even care who it was.  I didn't even care who it was.

Broderick meanders through her undemanding role without contributing much to it, although in the right circumstances she can be a real asset to a film.  Not here.  After this tiresome thing, Withers was played in two more movies by ZaSu Pitts who I fear may be even less appropriate for the role than Broderick.  The character vanished from the screen, to appear once more in a 1970s TV movie played by Eve Arden whose years as Our Miss Brooks must have prepared her adequately for the spinster schoolmarm duties.  All I know right now is that of the three I have seen, this one is the worst.  If it ever comes on TV, get some cleaning done instead.

WORKS OF ETGAR KERET

One day I found upon the comics shelves of the otherwise pretty lousy Holgate Branch Library, a short walk from my home, a volume called How To Love, containing works by the Actus comics collective.  Seriously, the Holgate Branch Library is the lousiest library I have ever encountered.  It used to be pretty okay for a little neighborhood branch library but it seemed that once every few years they would undertake an assessment which concluded that they should reduce the number of  actual books, and see that the ones they kept were mostly thin illustrated books with shiny covers with the word dummy or idiot in the title.  If you just want to browse it is worse than useless - it is insulting.  A real tragedy considering how great almost every other library in the city is. 

I was pleased by the quality of the works in How To Love,  and surprised to find that there were people in Israel who just want to live normal daily lives.  I was ashamed to be surprised.  For you see, Actus is an Israeli comics collective.  Realizing one's ignorance is the first step toward removing it and I had soon read the few other available volumes of Israeli cartoonists - two by Rutu Modan (Jamilti and Exit Wounds) whose clear-line style and nostalgic/surreal stories are fascinating, and Jetlag, a collection of  works drawn by various artists, based on the stories of Etgar Keret.  I had never heard of Keret but instantly saw in him something I had never seen before and didn't even know what it was.

Keret's books are not the kind you want to read right through.  They would be good to have around where you could pick one up and spend a few minutes reading a story and go about your day digesting them.  His stories are very very short and each one is unique. Each one is strange in a new way, a boiled down Twilight Zone compressed into two or three pages and inserted into the real world.  However unimaginable the situations and events, they seem Normal with a capital N. 

Keret has also had his works transformed into movies, with varying results.  The most mainstream of them is Wristcutters, A Love Story (2006), based on a single story of the crummy half-assed afterlife to which suicides are doomed. Meduzot [Jellyfish] (2007) is written and directed by Keret and his wife, Shira Geffen, and is made up of a group of stories which intersect but don't overlap.  An inept and alienated young woman finds some of life's meaning in a beautiful child who appears from the sea, a Filipina works as companion to a harsh elderly woman who doesn't seem to appreciate her daughter's life as a stage actress, and a young couple are having a rather unhappy honeymoon when they encounter a mysterious writer staying in the same hotel. $9.99 (2008) is an Australian/Israeli stop motion animated film comprising a group of Keret's stories which, as in Meduzot, intersect without overlapping.  It suffers, in my opinion, from that type of physical ugliness unique to stop motion animated characters, and bears a touch of that unsettling Australian psychology which makes me apprehensive every time I have to decide whether or not to watch an Aussie movie.  There is a beggar who commits suicide and returns with wings - still the same mooching bum but with wings.  There is a woman who wants her men to be smooth and clean - really smooth and clean.  There is a young man who looks to a mail order book for his answers to life's problems and the book costs $9.99.  Of the three, Meduzot is the one that best conveys the spirit of Keret's work and I recommend it.  It has another value which I think is very important, in showing life in Israel without religion and politics.  It is not a commentary on anything other than living as a human being.

If you have a few moments to spare, and would like to try out an Etgar Keret story there are a few you can read on his website here.   You can also learn about some of his other activities, like the four foot wide house.

So why was I surprised to learn that there were regular people in Israel?  Try not to freak out when I tell you this.  That place has got more baggage than any other country on earth.  You never hear anything but politics, religion, conflict from that place.  Sometimes I want to smack that country and say just be Human first, then be religious or nationalist or whatever you want to be, because all that stuff isn't as fascinating to me as it seems to be to you.  We all brush our teeth the same way. Keret doesn't write Israeli stories, or Jewish stories, political or religious stories.  He writes stories that can fit into any brain without having to be an example of something or teach a lesson about something, and they make you see things a little bit differently.

ALINE BROSH MCKENNA AND THE FEMALE ACTION MOVIE

After I binged out on Mexican horror movies for Halloween I needed a break. Not a break from watching movies, that would be the smart thing to do.  I needed to see something nice.  A chick flick.  After a couple of false starts I settled on Morning Glory (2010).  I remembered that it got fairly good reviews when it came out, then promptly vanished forever.  That's just what I needed, something fluffy that would drift away on a breath, that would show a glossy snapshot of a pleasant world.  Morning Glory is about the Clumsy-cute Spunky Girl Who Won't Give Up.  She finds herself thrust into place as director of the worst rated morning talk show on television and she has to get those ratings up or they will cancel the show.  The only way to do it is with a plan that is so crazy it just might work - drag in a surly highly respected journalist and try to force him to banter.  It's a Shirley Temple movie, with Harrison Ford as the old grump who must be won over by cute little Rachel McAdams' cheerful never-say-die attitude.  But of course what it really takes is for her to finally snap and bitch him out for being a hateful old jerk. It was cute.  It washed my brain clean.

When I looked it up I found that it was written by Aline Brosh McKenna, the screenwriter of The Devil Wears Prada (2006), which I kind of hated.  One thing I didn't hate about it though was the writing.  As I said, I eventually started to like it.  That's what happened with Morning Glory - I never really hated it but I finally liked it for what it was.  So I figured what the hell let's check out something else by Aline Brosh McKenna and see what happens.

I looked up 27 Dresses (2008) and it seemed like the sort of thing that was the least like anything I would ever want to experience, so I knew I ought to see it.  The way I am different from a lot of people is instead of just learning about things I know I will like I try to learn about things I might not like, but I try to find something good in them.  Some stuff I know about, like zombies.  I saw Lucio Fulci movies in the '70s at drive ins and dollar movies so zombies are OLD OLD hat to me.  You can keep your zombies.  Unless they include Milla Jovovich all strapped up in black leather.  But being a bridesmaid, that is something I don't know about.  I have been to a couple of weddings and what an incredible waste.  Weddings are anathema to me, so the idea of there being a person who is a wedding junkie, or women who dream all their lives about the perfect wedding, that is just INSANE.  The titular dresses are a closet full of bridesmaid dresses, and this whole movie probably got kickstarted by the brief online Horrible Bridesmaid Dresses craze.  The hero of the movie is the person who always does everything for everyone else and never for herself, a wedding junkie with a closet full of horrible dresses, one from each wedding she has been in.  She is played by Katherine Heigl, who seems to be popular for her non-threatening everywoman appeal.  She is hopelessly in love with her handsome boss and when her younger prettier sister comes along and snatches him up something has to snap.  You could send this movie back to 1938 and put Claudette Colbert in it and it would work just the same - changing dresses in the back of a taxicab (driven by Allen Jenkins) as she rushes from one wedding to the next.  It was after seeing this that I understood that these are Female Action Movies.

An action movie has a hero seeking a fabulous object in exotic locations with an inferior sidekick, facing obstacles and adversaries which become progressively more difficult until at last the good guy wins.  Except in these movies it isn't vengeance or a million dollars in gold, it's the fulfillment of a lifelong dream or true love.  There are no explosions except emotional ones, no leaping through windows shooting two machine pistols as a ball of flame explodes behind you, except with your heart.  The sidekicks are not ever-present, sometimes they are quite intermittent but they are there, to act as a sounding board or to give advice - not cute and spunky like the hero but helpful and convenient.  The adversaries are not evil, just unsympathetic, selfish, oblivious to the feelings of others, and they are not defeated, just brought around to the side of righteousness.

Armed with that knowledge I tried out I Don't Know How She Does It (2011), though not without some trepidation.  I almost chickened out.  Sarah Jessica Parker is the urban mother of two who does something important in investment banking that nobody understands which causes her to always be going somewhere and breaking promises to her daughter.  Maybe she just waited to start a family but at some points Parker is looking a little haggard, and maybe too old for these cheerful chatter roles, but what else has she got going for her?  She's going to have to be playing crazy grandmas someday. Through much of the movie I found myself exclaiming "I HATE THIS," and yet the overall effect was that I actually liked it. One very important adventure aspect of the Female Action Movie is public embarrassment.  In each of these movies there are moments of supreme public embarrassment which, contrary to her expectations, the hero survives with few repercussions.  Falling down, hitching up your underwear where everybody can see you, getting lice from your kid.  It happens, it's over, nobody dies - like crossing that jungle rope bridge over the piranha river chased by cannibals, it seems like it is going to be terrible but then it is over and you cut the ropes and keep running.

I had some momentum going so it was either We Bought A Zoo (2011)  or Laws of Attraction (2004).  I don't know about the zoo thing, and kids and animals so I will pass on that one.  Laws of Attraction stars Julianne Moore and Pierce Brosnan as two high-powered divorce lawyers who instantly hate each other so obviously they must fall into bed as soon as possible and eventually wake up from a drunken spree - married.  This wasn't quite as specialized as a Female Action movie as McKenna's later work and it would be a good married date movie because naturally any divorce movie ultimately affirms marriage.

Finally I tried to finish it off with Three To Tango (1999) but McKenna was merely co-writer on it and frankly it stank so bad I happily quit after 15 minutes of heavy-handed yoks and gay jokes.  So there you go.  That was my foray into Aline Brosh McKenna territory and what I learned from it was that your sidekick will always be there for you when you do something stupid and humiliating. If you just keep trying and never give up you will finally find true love, have your dream wedding, and balance a happy home with a career in high finance.  Sometimes you just have to snap, and smack somebody down, and think about yourself for once, and show them you are a human being too, but it will all work out okay in the end.  That's how it is in the movies anyway.

MEXICAN HALLOWEEN PART 6

Suffering sometimes brings rewards, and two nights of crap make a good night that much more pleasant.

El mundo de los vampiros (1961) was written by Alfredo Salazar, and directed by Alfonso Corona Blake who went on to bless the world with Santo Versus the Vampire Women and Santo in the Wax Museum.  In the case of Sr. Blake I can assert that this movie right here was the greatest thing he ever did, probably.  I have seen more vampire movies than I can count and I have never seen one quite like this. Filmed on the startlingly large and elaborate well-lit sets of Churubusco Azteca, it has a great look from the very first shot of a hand groping out of a slowly opening coffin.  Multigenerational family curses seem to be a feature of Mexican horror stories, and this one is the three hundred year vengeance curse of Count Sergio Subotai, Vampire, against the descendants of the Colman family, and if he doesn't get his vengeance venged right now he will have to wait another hundred years.  Another feature of these stories is hairy-handedness - when you get vampire bit the first sign of impending vampirism is you get hair on your hands.  That is the universal sign of something going wrong in your life, when you get hair on your hands, because the next thing you know you are going to get claws and probably a big hairy pig nose and soon you will be running around in a cape and top hat going RAAAAAR! That doesn't happen in this though, I am just talking. You can forget about the plot and just watch the crazy things happening - the Bone Organ, the Pit of Impalement, the mob of stupid looking masked sub-vampires and spooky looking she-vamps, the fortuitous appearance of an expert on the psychological effects of music.  And this:

 

I like to fell over when I saw this insanely wonderful human-headed bat.  I have never seen that before ever.  I have also never seen the main vampire suddenly in the middle of the big fight inexplicably grow big furry bat ears.  To help him fight.  Every minute of this movie is full of great stuff to see, even if it is just the imaginative way the big fancy set is lit - it's as gorgeously filmed as any great Hollywood b-movie of the 1940s.  This is going on my list of all time favorite horror movies, second only to El espejo de la bruja (The Witch's Mirror).  I have used up all my raving and will just fill this out with absolute proof of my assertions in the form of these images:

The lovely Erna Bauman, who went on to grace El vampiro sangriento 

and La invasion de los vampiros with her solemn beauty.

Go and do likewise.

MEXICAN HALLOWEEN PART 5

Mexico - in the late '60s it was where old monsters went to die. 

Fear Chamber (1969) was one of a batch of bargain basement movies Boris Karloff was lured south of the border to make for the sake of a paycheck - legend has it that paycheck was found uncashed among his effects after his death.  I am sure the circumstances of the making of those films and their posthumous release has been well documented, if you care.  I have seen one of the others, Snake People, and was surprised that this was not quite as dreadful as I had anticipated but still it is a disgrace in many ways.  Karloff's character takes to a sick-bed part way through the movie and doesn't appear again until the very end to clean things up, but a good bit of his dialog throughout is delivered into a telephone while others carry on the action of the story - if you can call it a story.  It seems he had discovered a type of subterreanean mineral intelligence by aiming some kind of atomic telescope at the earth's core, which fact is revealed near the end of the movie, in a dream sequence.  That shows just how broken up and inept the plot, script and overall execution of this thing is.  They don't seem to be able to shoot a scene in a way that you can tell what is happening, or in many cases so you can even tell what it is you are looking at.  Perhaps they realized that the rock monster was so stupid looking they should not give it one clearly visible shot but instead shoot only blurry closeups of some lumpy thing twitching around with smoke and colored lights.  Did I mention that to stay alive it needs a substance which is only formed in a human body in a state of terror?  A female human body?  That explains why they have to lure women into a spook house dungeon and torment them for a while before sucking out their blood for the monster rock.  Luckily it grows an elephant trunk after a while which it can grab them with and suck their blood out, making the spook house and its associated henchmen unnecessary.  I will give them one thing, the lab set looks pretty good.

 

 That blurry thing there is a representative shot of the monster.  The print I acquired also included a scene of gratuitous nudity deleted from the general release, and believe me even a little gratuitous nudity can really pep up something this badly made.

Pacto diabolico (1969) is an unconvincing costume effort inspired by Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  There isn't all that much you can do with that story.  You know eventually there is going to be a hairy-handed strangler involved, no matter what else happens.  John Carradine plays a former colleague of Jekyll who hopes to alter the transformation technique to create an elixir of youth and it does transform him into a younger Mexican actor, relieving him of some responsibility for how this turns out.  The essential ingredient of this elixir is just what you would expect - the eyes cut out of women's heads. Their eyes. Once again the magic of transformation baffles me, as Carradine's facial hair disappears with his wrinkles and reappears when the serum wears off.  At least it doesn't transform his clothes. I watched him very carefully, and it appears Carradine delivered his lines in Spanish, but apparently it wasn't good enough so he was dubbed.  Maybe there is an English print, I don't really care, but he does have one deranged line that I would enjoy hearing in his own lushly stentorian tones. This movie is meant as a period piece of a vaguely nineteenth century nature, and filmed mostly on cheap little sets that look just like cheap little sets and nothing more.  They are brightly lit from above whether people are carrying a candelabra around or not.  Fortunately there was a brief moment of gratuitous nudity, enough to give me hope that there might be another, which gave me the strength to endure the chasing and brawling that results when a hairy handed strangler goes after a young woman with a fiancee.  For some reason the primary young woman in the movie is the daughter of Dr. Jekyll.  That made me hope it might end up being a Daughter of Dr. Jekyll thing and that she might transform too, but no.  

See how hairy that hand is?  It will soon be strangling.  And see how crummy looking that set is?  And see how lousy the print is? I had to tweak these images in a graphics program just to make them decipherable to you, which shows what a great guy I am.  What you can't see here is the most horrible thing about the movie - the soundtrack.  The opening credits are backed with a horrendous continuous random piano noodling and organ pounding and I thought, "My god, what am I going to have to endure?"  The more exciting things were supposed to be the more random and horrific the background noise became.  Worst of all were the laboratory scenes - even though there were no electronics of any kind the lab scenes were overlaid with a continuous wooping and bleeping noise meant to indicate apparatus I suppose.  Four seconds worth.  The same stupid and absolutely inappropriate noises repeating every four seconds the whole time anyone was in the laboratory. 

I tell you, these two were pretty rough to make it through and I am going try to watch better things for the rest of this exercise because fun is fun but this ain't it.

MEXICAN HALLOWEEN PART ONE

Having determined to regale my small but sporadic readership with my experiences in enjoying a week of thrills from South of the Border, I promptly disabled myself in the middle of the first movie with a medical error.  I took a migraine pill the wrong way at the wrong time and put myself down for about five hours after the damnedest physical reaction I have ever had.  However I pulled through and here I am to do my duty.

Il mostruoso dottor Crimen (1952) a.k.a The Revived Monster, is said to be Mexico's first Mad Doctor movie.  [Addendum: the correct Spanish title is El monstruo resuscitado - I was watching an Italian print of the film with dual Italian/Spanish audio and English subtitles.] A jaded journalist answers an enigmatic advertisement which leads her into the bizarre domain of a masked doctor in his gloomy mansion between the cemetery and the sea.  His hideous countenance and social rejection drove him to become a renowned plastic surgeon and amateur sculptor of waxen beauties, but naturally his inner conflicts and isolation from humanity have deranged him.  

She becomes the first person ever to show him kindness or encouragement, inducing him to unmask, but when he learns that her true motivation is to get a great story he contrives a convoluted revenge.  This involves the inexplicable revivification of a handsome corpse by somehow transferring into it the life force of the beast-man he keeps caged in the basement, the resulting revenant being operated by the remote power of his insane mind.  This is really a gothic melodrama with plenty of appeal for the ladies - a strong independent female falling into a relationship with a pitiable but creative soul who ultimately becomes too crazy to endure.  How many times has that happened to you?  It happens here every day. 

This was filmed at the Churubusco Azteca studios, the RKO of Mexico, on a couple of very nice elaborate interior sets and some strange little exterior ones the size of a garage with a rear projection screen at the end showing the sea or the city.  It is a realm of endless night and one thing I love about these Mexican horror movies is their dark beauty.  The scenes are often staged with a truly artistic eye for lighting and the striking forms of arches and silhouettes, as these images reveal:

Despite its thrifty and slightly primitive origin it achieves a powerful mood and its melodramatic and sentimental nature becomes quite affecting.  Its formulas and cliches are not of the Mad Doctor variety, but more of the Doomed Romance style of older horror films, the pathetic situation of a gifted man who is too ugly and crazy to live, and an endangered woman whose error was in showing kindness to someone too poorly socialized to understand it.   

YES, it's the hideous story of my OWN TERRIBLE LIFE!!!!

MAID IN HOLLYWOOD - Katherine Jackson

 Katherine Jackson was only in two movies, and she played Glory Bell the maid in the nautical adventure Mutiny Ahead (1935). Here she is looking skeptically upon the advances of Sassafrass the cook, played by Ray Cook with his distinctively toothy grin.

 Glory Bell is a sassy maid, and Miss Jackson has a bright personality that adds a lot to the proceedings.  The film treats both of them pretty well with Sass cleaning out the entire crew with his extensive knowledge of those rolling bones, and Glory Bell getting the last word with everyone.

MOVIES

I am probably the only person you know who even knows who Wheeler and Woolsey are.  I never let an opportunity to watch a Wheeler and Woolsey movie escape me.  They just crack me up.  Peach-O-Reno (1931) is as good as any of them.  Their usual girl foil, squeaky cute jazz-baby Dorothy Lee, is joined by Zelma O'Neal who can be seen at the end of the I Want to be Bad clip from Follow Thru, posted below.  Peach-O-Reno is a divorce farce, a popular subject for many years, until the code clamped down, and Bert Wheeler has an extended sequence, including a musical number, in drag.  Looks pretty good too.  That's all, I just like to post these drag shots when I get a chance.

TITANIC SECRET ORIGINS

This is a shot of a hallway set from Forbidden World (1982), Roger Corman's Alien ripoff.  Note that the walls are lined with takeout boxes below, and bulk egg cartons above.  According to Beverly Gray's biography of Corman this technique was developed by the art director for the 1980 Star Wars ripoff Battle Beyond the Stars (still one of my favorite SF movies - I used to watch it once a year).  "He had everyone collecting styrofoam containers from McDonald's hamburgers - when spraypainted silver, these looked impressive lining the walls of a spacecraft.  ...if the actor should turn around quickly and slam into the wall, the whole thing would crumble.  Then you had to go back and get more boxes."  That art director was 26 year old James Cameron, and thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people are watching his movie Titanic at the moment I am writing this.  That's how he got his start, gluing McDonald's boxes to the wall of a spaceship set.  Or so the story goes.

RUN IT THROUGH THE HOLLYWOODIZER

Last night I enjoyed the absurd, and entertainingly brief, 1932 film inspired by Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue.  It inspired me, in turn, to re-read (after some forty years) the story to see just how wildly the movie varies from the source.  Poe's locked-room murder mystery (with notably grotesque details and circumstances) is enhanced by the addition of a romance and a madman.  Bela Lugosi is introduced as a bizarre charlatan devoted to proving evolution by injecting women with gorilla blood, from which they naturally die.  Here is Lugosi berating one of his victims:

Your blood is rotten!  Black as your sins!  Your beauty was a LIE!

Here is that victim, lovely Arlene Francis, years later, quizzing a mystery guest on the television game show What's My Line:

One of the first things one realizes upon reading Poe's story is that there is no morgue in it.  It's the name of a street in Paris. There might be a morgue in that street but there is not one in the story.  I can hear in my mind the gravelly voice of a cigar chomping studio dictocrat, "Where's the morgue?  If there is a morgue in the title people want to see a morgue."  So there is a morgue, and a carnival, and a romance, and a gorilla carrying an unconscious negligee-clad woman across the rooftops of Paris, and Poe's amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin is renamed Pierre, probably because Auguste doesn't sound French enough.  "What's a French name?  Pierre.  Change it to Pierre."

I enjoyed reading the story again, mainly because it is so refreshing, after what passes for writing nowadays, to read page after page without a single grammatical atrocity, to see the correct use of  "farther," to encounter quondam and pasquinade in the same paragraph.  I admit that I have never really gotten Poe; though I have read all his works it was more out of a sense of duty than affection.  He wrote clearly and succinctly, compared to the turgid style of many of his contemporaries.  His observations show a certain acuity and I especially liked his statement on the common error of mistaking complexity for profundity.

I also enjoyed seeing the movie - I can't remember if I ever saw it before, and it is not a real standout in any event.  Despite the good production  values and exotic details it is ultimately a bit flat in its effect.  It doesn't seem to horrify or thrill as it was intended.  I attribute some of its weakness to the abandoning or softening of some of the  most grotesque conceptions of the original - little is made of the bizarre circumstance of a corpse brutally thrust up a chimney, and the disturbing idea of an ape running amok with a razor (used with full intention by Dario Argento in his film Phenomena) was discarded.  At best it is a harmless hour of the bizarre which is unlikely to provoke in the average viewer as much thought as you have seen here today.

THAT'S HEAVEN TO ME

This excerpt from the "I Want to be Bad" number in the 1930 technicolor musical Follow Thru is an accurate depiction of what I hope heaven will be like.  It's not a great movie but it introduced the perennial "Button Up Your Overcoat" to the wider public, and it features the following disturbing scene of Eugene Pallette in drag:

GOODBYE

THE SANEST MAN WHO EVER LIVED

"I'll soon be rid of my torture... 

then I'll be the sanest man who ever lived!"

Bela Lugosi in The Raven (1935)