Movies

The Public Cemetery Under the Moon (1967) This Korean melodrama of supernatural vengeance was of great socio-anthropological interest to me in its presentation of idealized settings and circumstances. A maidservant schemes to poison and replace her mistress, with most of the action taking place within the confines of a wealthy household during the Japanese occupation of Korea. It begins with a pleasantly hokey spook spectacle with the late wife rising out of her cloven grave mound to protect her infant son from the plotting poisoner, then tells the tale from the beginning, winding up with more lurid and rather violent and atrocious scare stuff in the end. All the women wear traditional attire throughout, and the sets seem rather intricately garish and overdecorated. It's not enough for the protagonist to be miserably poisoned, she is eventually driven to suicide by false accusations of adultury, and the scene of her last testament and suicide note being sung over her coffin, surrounded by weeping mourners, was fascinating and stirring. The production values are quite good but the scare technique is primitive, often relying on intercutting lurid random ghost shots with a series of terrified reactions. Run over here, and there's a blue-lit close-up of the ghost with blood-dripping fangs. Scream and run over there and cut to the ghost backlit in medium shot with her hair down and blowing. Et cetera. What appears to be a cultural tendency toward misery and suffering is shown strongly here with the middle section of the story a drawn out depiction of the victim's decline and compounded sufferings, and the husband is at one point tortured by the Japanese for no reason which contributes to the story. Very educational for me but not what I would call a whole lot of fun. 5/10

Traditional upper-class Korean setting and attire.

Nancy Drew, Trouble Shooter (1939) The third Nancy Drew film and a very poor one, a cynical cash-in quickie with a bad script. It takes almost half the movie for them to really get going on the mystery, working up to it with too much focus on the characters, resulting in a lot of sitcom and slapstick. Bonita Granville is cute and bright, and is set off in charming costumes with pleated skirts or loose draped slacks, and nice fedora-style hats. The film's most notable feature is a negative one - Willie Best's role as Apollo Johnson, a perfection of the stereotype of shiftless chicken-stealing childishly superstitious moronic Negro. I am accustomed to the standards of that day, and can be fairly tolerant of the universal depiction of any ethnic character through stereotypes, but this is a nadir point for African Americans which I found saddening and very hard to watch. I felt saddest for Mr. Best, for having done this terrible thing. I feel it might not have been too bad for this film to have been lost, but the best thing would have been for it not to have been made at all. 1/10