1955 - Powell and Pressburger crash and burn with OH ROSALINDA! their anti-musical

I like Powell and Pressburger as much as the next film nut but what the hell were they thinking when they made this film? This team was always extremely eccentric with the type of films they made but whose idea was it to update Die Fledermaus to the contemporary setting of occupied Vienna after World War II? Why cast a prima ballerina Ludmilla Tcherina, as the lead character and then not have her dance that seems like an even goofier idea.

Powell and Pressburger's plan was to take the "legendary" Johann Strauss operetta Die Fledermaus and apparently update it a bit. They had the lyrics translated into English and they filmed the whole thing on sound stages in CinemaScope. Artificial sets were created to heighten the unreality of the whole thing, as if the whole film wasn't unreal enough by this point. Where they got the idea that people would want to watch actors performing to overdubbed songs from an operetta that was staged back in 1874 would be anyone's idea of a good time boggles this little mind. Apparently the thinking was that they could make a stylish entertainment out of an idea like this. But, Powell and Pressburger's idea of stylish humor is to have an overweight Austrian sitting around eating strudel, that's really funny stuff alright.

Why any studio would have given Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger the money to film this garbage completely escapes me, didn't anyone read the script or listen to the outdated music? Only complete creative arrogance on the part of the filmmakers can explain this thing.

Film historians usually claim that Michael Powell's career ended with Peeping Tom, but I could make the very strong argument that Oh Rosalinda is the real end of the line for him.

1957 - TOCCOTA FOR TOY TRAINS by Ray and Charles Eames

15 minutes with a lot of charm. Furniture designers Charles and Ray Eames made this film in 1957 with toy train set collections. The film is photographed from the point of view of the trains and has some remarkable shots of the moving trains. Elmer Bernstein who usually wrote big bombastic scores for movies like The Ten Commandments and many John Wayne westerns composed the music for a small instrumental ensemble.

This is the kind of film that shows what talent and hard work can produce, getting those toy trains to move took a hell of a lot of effort. It's extremely hard to pull off this type of fluff. Puts the Pixar and Disney stuff to shame.

1979 - MAGNIFICENT BUTCHER-stars Jackie Chan's buddy

 

Supposedly one of the better Hong Kong, kung fu films. Sammo Hung co-directed and stars in a typical mix of extreme broad comedy and martial arts fighting type of film that was popular in Asian cinema in the late 1970's and early 80's. Sammo Hung is a fascinating character in Hong Kong movies, he is an actor, director and stunt coordinator for many Hong Kong action films. He is also a friend of Jackie Chan and has worked with him on many occasions. The most interesting thing about Hung is that he is a rather heavy set man who is extremely graceful on his feet. He gives off a vibe of "if he can do that stuff so can I " with his fighting style. The movie seemed a little stiff to me.

 
This is a pre-Matrix type of kung fu movie where the fighting is an exaggerated acrobatic style, not super over the top but kind of stiff and slow, at times it seems like the opponents are waiting for each other to hit them. The plot mixes lots of slapstick comedy with kung fu fighting, and has strange jarring moments of melodrama and violence. This is kind of a typical mash up for this Hong Kong  movie. If you can't get into the frame of mind for this style of movie making, it can seem pretty stupid to western audiences.

108 minutes.

2009 - LAND OF THE LOST is a homage to Irwin Allen

Land Of The Lost has now been considered a major 2009 summer bomb from Universal Studios. People seemed to have thought this was a send up of the old Saturday morning TV series but they missed the point. The is actually a spoof/tribute of the Irwin Allen type of science fiction adventure shows that were popular in the 1960's.

Everything is in this great tribute to the "Master of Disaster", Irwin Allen. Cheesy sets that look like they were made out of paper mache, special effects that barely get by, ridiculous monster costumes, an absurd plot which while on the surface makes absolutely no sense still has a strange logic, over the top acting and ridiculous action sequences. Will Ferrell and Jim McBride spoof the typical Irwin Allen heroes. Ferrell is sending up the Professor Challenger character from Allen's film, The Lost World. McBride plays the part usually played by David Hedison except he plays it as a redneck goofball. The only disappointing casting is the English actress Anna Friel who has the part usually played by Jill St John, only she doesn't have Jill St John's body. The part of "the girl" in an Irwin Allen production was always some B-level actress like Jill St John, Barbara Eden or Lynda Day George.

Spoofing old science fiction movies has a built in danger to it because the filmmakers take the risk of not letting the audience in on the joke, that appeared to be the problem here. Irwin Allen was a great producer and director, he always scrimped and recycled actors and sets. He would literally reuse, scenes from his TV shows and movies in his other productions hoping the audience wouldn't notice and usually they didn't notice. He was a real cheapskate.

What the people who made Land Of The Lost didn't understand when they put this movie into production was that Irwin Allen never spent 100 million dollars on all of his movies and TV shows combined. Allen had a clear idea of the value of what he was putting out for product. Universal really shouldn't have spent 100 million dollars on Land Of The Lost.

1950 - THIS IS KOREA, a lost John Ford film that probably should have stayed lost

Only on YouTube would something like this unseen John Ford film show up.

 

In 1950, John Ford traveled to Korea to supervise the filming of a propaganda film for the United States Navy.  Ford had a big success during World War II with his other short documentary film The Battle of Midway.  Ford and his team had filmed the The Battle of Midway, with color 16mm cameras, and at times got so close to the Japanese bombing of Midway Island that the camera film jumped out of the sprocket holes. Then, to avoid the War Department censors, he smuggled the film back to the United States edited it in secret and managed to get the film shown to President Roosevelt.

Released to the general public. The Battle of Midway was corny and very emotional but it also gave the 1940's audience a view of the war in color,  something that hadn't been seen at that time.

Ford during the filming of This Is Korea

By the time of the Korean War, the US Navy had persuaded Ford to make another documentary about our involvement in that conflict. This time Ford meet with a lot less success. Ford attempted to frame the conflict with his usual theme of "victory in defeat."  Ford had a subplot of an American unit surrounded by the North Koreans during the winter.  He actually had the audacity to compare this to George Washington at Valley Forge.  Ford included lots of shots of cute Korean kids being raised by Catholic missionaries, one kid is even renamed Babe Ruth. The film concluded with a Catholic Mass being observed during wartime which  was pretty manipulative.

Ford also loaded up the film with lots of footage of the United States Army shooting heavy weapons into the mountains, while a narrator announces what type of ordnance is being blasted into the hills. The viewer also gets scenes of planes dropping napalm onto houses, the narrator says things like "burn em out." Watching scenes of people being burned to death probably isn't going to advance the cause of
 democracy very much.

  

World War II had been the defining moment in John Ford's life. Ford saw a lot of action during that war and had photographed the Nazi extermination camps. He had to have been deeply affected by what he had been through and it turned him into a super patriot. Unfortunately for Ford, the Korean conflict did not really lend itself to the same film making style he had used on The Battle of Midway.

2003 - DESTINO, the original odd couple Walt Disney and Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali considered Walt Disney one of the three creative forces in film. He probably never saw two of Disney's masterpieces, The Apple Dumpling Gang and The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes.

Invited by Alfred Hitchcock to design the dream sequences for Spellbound in 1945. Neither man was satisfied with his work on that film. Dali was disappointed in the filming of the dream sequences and Hitchock though Dali was a nut case.

Dali was introduced to Walt Disney at a party, Disney invited Dali to collaborate on a short animated film and the rest was not history. After preparing a storyboard and artwork for the project it was abandoned.

The project was resurrected and in 2003 completed. It's probably fairly close to what Dali and Disney had in mind. But I think the problem with this project was that these two men were artistically unsuited to collaborate. Disney always had some pretensions to a higher artistic calling, but his cartoon technique evolved into a realism which can be seen in his characters in Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella. Fantasia is actually a fairly middlebrow film, the abstract Bach Toccata and Fugue sequence at the beginning of that picture is pretty conventional in it's design. Dali was a surrealist, it was going to be an odd mixture of styles.

The short film does have a lot of Dali touches, melting clock faces, things cracking and ants crawling out of a hand. It also has for some strange reason a baseball player which I assume is the Disney touch.

7 minutes.

1981 - Book Review THY NEIGHBOR'S WIFE

Finished Thy Neighbors Wife, a sex history of the United States through the 1970's. I can remember in 1980 being on my lunch break at work and spending time in a nearby bookstore thumbing through this book looking for the dirty stuff. Now that I've read it 20 years later, turns out it's not that kind of book and there really isn't that kind of dirty stuff in it. The author, Gay Talese claimed to do 9 years worth of research on the topic and he even wrote himself into the book at the end as a kind of third person character. This is a very ambitious book. Talese focused on several areas, a history of smut and porn magazines in America and their battle with legal censorship, the life of Hugh Hefner the founder of Playboy magazine and an examination of open relationships and wife swapping that seemed to be all the rage in the 1970's. When it comes to sex you name it, and Talese appeared to look into it. In the first part of the book dirty magazines and nudist books set up a battleground over censorship in America. The fact that it's sleazy little men battling with the United States Post office over the right to sell this stuff makes it a fascinating piece of Americana in a slimy kind of way. The Hugh Hefner saga is a pathetically interesting page turner. Hefner seems to be a smart guy who was able to take his adolescent sex fantasies and wring an entire lifestyle and lifetime of silly hedonistic behavior into a career. Was the "Playboy" world of the pipe smoking tuxedoed bachelor ever cool? It was like watching an adolescent boy sneak his first R rated movie past his parents and then being pleased with himself afterwards. Even Hefner, the 60's swinger manages to get himself entangled with two playboy playmates, Barbie Benton and Karen Christy. The women become involved with him but ultimately they both end up leaving him since he isn't really able to satisfy them emotionally. His childish behavior over the breakup of these relationships is pretty revealing.

Finally Talese spends a lot of time on Sandstone Retreat, a partner swapping commune located in Malibu California. Here the reader gets a look into for lack of a better term a "sex resort" for the pretty people. The goals of the founders, to practice an open lifestyle seem honest and sincere, but by the end of this little adventure, Sandstone seems more like a glorified brothel.

In someways it all came to a screaming end with the AIDS epidemic. For me, the big problem with this book is the author's conclusion "Americans have always wanted it both ways when it comes to sex and morality." It kind of seems to me that after 550 pages on the complexities of sex in a culture like the United States, there should be a little more of an insight than this rather obvious point. A Wednesday afternoon watching Dr. Phil will tell you pretty much the same thing. Still, the book is very interesting, yeah it's a period piece now but a pretty interesting period piece extremely well written.

FUN WITH FILM AT THE MULTIPLEX

Below is a link to an amazing example of how one film is shown in 16 theaters.

It's called: INTERLOCKING

Original THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123 viewed before remake is released

Not spending much time on this one since comparison reviews of the old and new versions are everywhere. My son the other night was bothering me about seeing the remake of Pelham 123. I told him to watch the original version instead. I mentioned it about 2 more times and realized I was talking to the proverbial brick wall. Crawling away licking my wounds, I went for a walk with my wife bemoaning the fact that no one seems interested in watching quality films anymore when they can be entertained by the usual substandard garbage that passes for entertainment blah blah blah and etc. 

 

 

 

Much to my surprise when I returned from the walk, I found him watching it. This was my third time viewing this film and it will probably be my last. My impressions this time are: 

 

 

The original movie overall was still entertaining but maybe it's a bit overrated.

• Walter Matthau is great, but he doesn't get all the funny lines, a lot of the extras and background actors provide the humor, that was a clever idea.
• Gotta love that on location filming.
• Robert Shaw always made a good bad guy, hard to believe he started out as an acclaimed playwright.
• Matthau actually looks like a middle aged cop, the whole film seemed to be cast very carefully.
• Peter Stone wrote the screenplay, he was a very good writer.

 

 

Running time 104 minutes.

1974 - LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES features cameo by Count Dracula looking like a cheap whore

Dracula is barely in this Hammer film about Professor Van Helsing hunting Chinese vampires in China. He was apparently stuck in at the beginning and the end of the movie as a sop to the audience, who were probably confused about the mixing of the vampire and kung fu film genres. To further confuse the audience Dracula is made up to look like a drag queen. The movie has Peter Cushing as Professor Van Helsing who is in China lecturing when he is approached by a man who asks his help in ridding his village of vampires. The man has a family of siblings who are trained in kung fu and along with Van Helsing and his wimp of a son, they travel across China beating up the golden vampires. The kung fu action is the old style stuff where the fighters can't leap through the air defying gravity but it's still good. The movie is an exploitation piece for the most part. There is a incredibly stupid scene where Chinese woman are sacrificed to the golden vampires. The sacrifice involves having the women run around topless and has nothing to do with anything.

The movie also has a Norwegian "actress" named Julie Ege, who has a very large bosom. Her performance consists of cowering in terror every time the vampires attack and slowly peeling her clothes off. Apparently these were the roles she usually got in Britain, and she ended up quitting the movie business, went back to Norway and retrained as a nurse which she unsurprisingly told people was more personally rewarding for her. If you're looking for cheese cake pictures of her sorry you'll have to google her. Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, is entertaining junk that is worth watching because Peter Cushing is in it but it you are want to see a good film with vampires and kung fu, then check out Mr. Vampire.

COLOR OF THE POMEGRANETE features people in Armenia standing still

What fun, I figured out that this film was about a poet and watched as people stood still or barely moved for the next 90 minutes. The pictures were sure pretty. But I had not a clue what was going on, thank god for Wikipedia. And to quote Wikipedia:

"Sergei Parajanov's "Color of the Pomegranate", a biography of the Armenian ashug Sayat Nova (King of Song), reveals the poet's life more through his poetry than a conventional narration of important events in Sayat Nova's life. The movie shows the poet growing up, discovering the female forms, falling in love, entering a monastery and dying. But these incidents are depicted in the context of what are images from Sergei Parajanov's imagination and Sayat Nova's poems, poems that are seen and rarely heard. Sofiko Chiaureli plays 6 roles, both male and female, and Sergei Parajanov, works on virtually every aspect of this film, void of any dialog or camera movement.

His inspiration, he said, was "the Armenian illuminated miniatures. I wanted to create that inner dynamic that comes from inside the picture, the forms and the dramaturgy of colour." Got that, Wikipedia forgets to mention that there is a scene where someone stomps on a bunch of grapes, very symbolic. I like a good art film as much as the next person, but pretty pictures do not a film make for me anymore.

1941 - HELLZAPOPPIN features the comedy team of Olson and Johnson whoever they are.

A zany anything goes comedy from a very successful Broadway show of the 1940's. Hellzapoppin was apparently a comedy revue that was almost surrealistic on stage.

 

Universal bought the rights and then proceeded to stick a story on in because they were obviously very nervous about the out of control aspect of the play. Still it appears that a lot of the original nature of the play did make it onto the screen, and it's still some pretty nutty stuff. It has a Citizen Kane joke, for god sakes. and the opening number set in Hell is pretty weird.

  

The stupid love story that the studio stuck onto the film slows the action down, but things pick up towards the end, with an all out anarchistic assault on Broadway and film musical numbers. Mel Brooks obviously got a lot of his ideas from this film. Frankenstein's monster watching in the audience gets things back on track when things get really out of control. Towards the end of the film the stars Ole Olson and Chic Johnson take their curtain call riding pigs.

 

Hellzapopin is proof that even in the 1940's during the rah rah war years, when "truth, justice and the American way" was the clarion call, satire was alive and kicking somewhere.

84 minutes, written by Nat Perrin,  Warren Wilson and Alex Gottlieb.

MAN ON THE EIFFEL TOWER actually has many men on the Eiffel Tower

Burgess "The Penguin" Meredith directed or partially directed this murder mystery set in Paris, filmed in 1950. This is a Columbo like murder mystery, where the viewer knows who did it, and the actual mystery is how the police will get "the goods" on him. Charles Laughton plays Inspector Maigret the police inspector who spends most of the movie outwitting the master criminal. This is an average movie at best, filmed on location in Paris with lots of location work all over the city. Laughton's a pro when it comes to acting and the final chase on the Eiffel Tower is exciting with people actually crawling around the structure. The movie is available on public domain websites for viewing. The prints are pretty poor, and it was filmed in some sort of weird color process called Ansco which gives it a strange look.

1957 - MEN IN WAR-one of the better films about the Korean War

 
The Korean War isn't a fun war like World War II. It doesn't have the larger than life villains like Hitler and Mussolini. It lacks the fanatical onslaught of hoards of the "yellow peril" of Japanese fighters descending on Pearl Harbor. It wasn't fought in Europe where you got all of that picturesque local European flavor to shoot up, or in the South Pacific, where apparently the sailors had time to stand around and sing "Bali Hai." Hollywood had a hard time making films about the Korean War, nobody really understood what the hell we were doing there other than it had something to do with communism and communism was going to destroy our way of life in the 1950's. Consequently there are not a lot of cool war movies made about the Korean war. Men in War is one of the few decent movies I've seen along with Pork Chop Hill and The Steel Helmet which is almost the entire list of Korean War films made in Hollywood.

  
The film focuses exclusively on a platoon of soldiers who are trapped behind enemy lines during one day. The plot has to do with them making their way back to safe ground, but this story spins it in interesting ways. The director is Anthony Mann who preferred to shot on location and who felt it was more realistic in a film to have the actors actually run up real hills than studio sets. The leads are Robert Ryan and Aldo Rey, two good actors but not big names. Ryan plays the Lieutenant in charge of the platoon. At the start of the film he seems sure of himself and in charge, by the end of the film he's lost control of the situation and is hoping he can keep himself alive. Rey is a Sergeant who is probably a psychopath who just happened to luck out by joining the army so he can kill people legally. Towards the end of the film Ryan comes to the realization that this is probably the type of guy the army needs as soldiers.

 

The scenes where the Americans kill the Koreans and then go through their pockets looting them were very effective. All of the Korean soldiers have pictures of their families in their pockets. The slow decimation of the platoon is also well done. Anthony Mann was always good at placing his actors in impressive compositions when filming. Here he gets interesting compositions placing the actors in tall grass and fields.

 The film was made on a small budget, but it was very carefully put together, photographed and edited for strong visual impact. The film is also extremely well acted, another good Anthony Mann film.

102 minutes.

1926 - Sjostrom's THE WIND, A Masterpiece

This is probably the best movie I've seen in the last four months. The actress Lillian Gish approached MGM in 1926 with a novel called The Wind. The book was about a woman from Virginia relocating to the American West. She ends up in a part of the country where the wind is constantly howling. The film is a love story, a drama, a horror story and a western rolled into a psychological study of a woman's emotional breakdown.

 

Gish was the producer behind this project. She found the book, prepared a synopsis of the story, hired the screenwriter, picked the cast and arranged for the Swedish Director Victor Sjostrom to direct.

Sjostrom was literally the father of Swedish film. He was a major influence on Ingmar Bergman and appeared in one of Bergman's best films Wild Strawberries in an outstanding performance at the age of 78.

In her introduction to the film, Gish comments that it was the toughest film she ever worked on, and after watching it, she's not kidding. No wimps were allowed making this film, the cast must have taken a real beating during the production.

 

Lillian Gish was one tough little cookie. She started in movies with D.W. Griffith and was still performing at age 96. No film is perfect and apparently MGM was so apprehensive over the film that they literally stuck on a happy ending the last 3 minutes of the film, but ignore it.

The Wind is an outstanding example of a talented European director working with a superb actress and cast and using the technical facilities that a major American studio could bring to produce a brilliant film. Very highly recommended.