1960 - Lesbian Vampire Euro Trash: BLOOD AND ROSES

The pictures make it look more interesting than it is. This is junk that was classed up by some excellent photography from Claude Renoir, grandson of Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The director is Roger Vadim who believe it or not was part of the famous French New Wave group that included Truffaut, Goddard and Chabrol. Vadim was in the sub division of the New Wave that was dedicated to marrying beautiful women and the sticking them in pseudo porno crap that were pushed off as films of erotic artistic expression.

 

The plot was based on some ancient vampire story called Carmilla except it was modernized and set in Italy where I suppose the idea was to juxtapose the decadence of the Italian aristocracy with the corruption of a sexy lesbian vampire. Or was it just an attempt on Vadim's part to see how far he could get away with having his two leading ladies play kissy face with each other? Vadim's latest wife at the time, Annette Vadim played Carmilla. Carmilla is in love with her cousin an Italian Count who is in love with another woman who seems to be half brain dead. Carmilla gets possessed by the soul of an ancient lesbian vampire, who was released during a fireworks display at the Count's estate. It's pretty easy to guess where the movie goes from that point.

The only interesting part of the movie is a lengthy dream sequence which was clearly influenced by Cocteau.

A good example of the foreign film as nudie peep show masquerading as art during the 1960's.

87 minutes.

1944 - Hitchock's banned World War II film AVENTURE MALGACHE

Hitchcock's 2nd World War II propaganda short after Bon Voyage had him taking a screen credit this time. This short film was made as a tribute to the French Resistance but was never released in France.

 

This film has a complex story telling style. It alternates between scenes of actors putting on a play and a story of a resistance leader in a battle of wits with a local Vichey official. Many of the French in this film are shown as untrustworthy and willing to betray their own countrymen to the authorities. A more realistic view of the French during World War II then anyone was ready for, it was not the rah rah film the Allies thought they were getting from Hitchcock.

A film where Hitchcock had more interest than making a standard propaganda piece. As usual "truth is the first casualty" during a war. The French weren't ready to even begin to confront the truth about themselves and their disreputable involvement with the Germans until 1969 when Ophul's The Sorrow and the Pity was released.

30 minutes.

2009 - TERMINATOR SALVATION, is what it is

  The budget for Terminator Salvation was $200 million dollars. The movie has made $124 million dollars. This is what you get for $200 million dollars:

"Come with me if you want to live."

"If you point that at someone be prepared to use it."

"There's enough nuclear fission in there to level this whole complex."

"We're not your enemy the machines are."

"We have to find this guy. "

"You wanted to see me?"

"No! I won't leave you!" "Thanks to you, now they know we're here."

"What is it that makes us human? It's not something you can program. You can't put it into a chip. It's the strength of the human heart."

"There is no fate, but what we make."

Written by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, the running time, 115 minutes.

1979 - HARPYA this one's good for a few nightmares

Saw this on the DVD Savant website. I'm not even going to think about the psycho/sexual aspects of this short film. Enjoy.

1966 - GHOST AND MR CHICKEN asks the question. How stupid are small town people?

Universal made a series of Don Knott's movies for the Midwest "silent majority" crowd. They used the creative team from The Andy Griffith Show to ask the question. How big a bunch of boobs live in a small Midwestern town? The answer is apparently a big bunch of boobs live in a small Midwestern town. Don Knotts could play only one part, his Barney Fife deputy sheriff character. It was somewhat pushing it that people would want to sit through over 90 minutes of his silly sthick in a low budget feature.

At first the movie lumbers along for about 40 minutes with Knotts doing his nervous Nelly routine. Along the way are lots of nameless but familiar television supporting actors wandering around. Look, the guy who played Otis the drunk on the Griffith show is playing a drunk in this movie. Look, Dick Sargent, his claim to fame was being cast as the second Darrin on Bewitched, he's Don's boss.

But my personal favorite is an actor named Skip Homeier. Homeier usually played bad guys. He was in two of the lamest original Star Trek episodes, the one with the Nazis and that outer space hippies vs Captain Kirk masterpiece , The Way to Eden. Of course he plays the guy being mean to Don.

At the forty minute mark this movie really gets going. Knotts is a would be reporter who is tricked into spending the night in a haunted house. After a series of creepy encounters, including some now famous ghostly organ music by TV composer Vic Mizzy the movie kicks into high gear.

A small town chamber of commerce picnic has Knotts giving a funny speech on the meaning of bravery. This is followed by a libel trial featuring a parade of character witnesses which include his second grade teacher and an accountant the president of the local UFO group who informs the court that they held their last meeting on Mars. Can't forget to mention the ladies of the "Psychic Occult Society of Rachel," who vibrate themselves into unconsciousness every time they touch Knotts. Something pretty strange is going on in this movie. One amusing little joke is the casting of a woman called Joan Staley. She plays Don's very wholesome love interest. In a previous career she was a Playboy Playmate of the Month. That should have made Don even more nervous.

1992 - BILLY WILDER SPEAKS and speaks and speaks and speaks

Filmed by Volker Schlöndorff in 1992 and edited down from a 3 hour documentary. Wilder rehashes the same stories he has told about his films and himself many times before. Since Wilder lived to be 96 years old, he had a lot of time to get his version right.

   

Even at the age of 88 when this was film was shot, Wilder still carries on at great length about the problems he had working with Marilyn Monroe while filming Some Like It Hot. Humphrey Bogart doesn't come off much better when Wilder discusses Sabrina. For Wilder, time did not heal old wounds.  

 

 

Wilder was a prickly verbally abusive kind of guy. He always worked with a co-writer when preparing his films and usually these writers couldn't stand to work with him again. His longest partnership with writer I.A.L. Diamond supposedly survived because Diamond was pretty much a human doormat.

 

Billy Wilder also kept an experienced editor on set with him while filming. This was to ensure that he didn't miss getting all of the required shots he needed during a scene. He stopped doing this in the mid 1960's which interestingly enough is when his hot streak finally ended. None of this comes up in the interview, no idol criticizing allowed in this film.

A disappointing film, you're probably better off reading the biography On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Time of Billy Wilder.

71 minutes. 

1934 - The good old days in the South, John Ford's JUDGE PRIEST

Tough film to watch. The old south after the Civil War is a wonderful place where happy black people sit around sing spirituals and cook fried chicken for their white employers. Will Rodgers, the Garrison Keillor of his day plays folksy wise Judge Billy Priest. Sitting in his courtroom dishing out justice, Judge Priest solves the problems of a young southern couple thwarted in love because she comes from the "wrong side of the tracks." He also saves a wrongly convicted man from going to jail when he reveals that man to be a hero of the Confederacy.





The whole idea of a film celebrating the idealized southern lifestyle where blacks and whites know their place in a southern community is laughable. Towards the end of the film the town celebrates the southern Confederacy with a parade of waving Confederate flags thus entering a special fantasy world that ignores the whole reason the Civil War was ever fought.

John Ford was a director who usually needed to be kept somewhat under control or he would tend to run amok with lots of corny jokes and sentimental slop running throughout his films. Ford's famous visual style is not present in this film.

1959 - Jean Pierre Melville's DEUX HOMMES DANS NEW YORK

French director Jean-Pierre Melville lover of all things American, particularly film noir movies, had an opportunity in 1959 to film in New York.

 

 A true auteur in the real sense, Melville wrote, directed and edited everyone of his films. Also a real independent filmmaker, Melville financed and built his own studio. The film about two French newspaper reporters searching for a missing United Nations diplomat turned out to be a disappointment. Melville's story was not very interesting and he had a serious tin ear when it came to getting decent performances out of his American actors.

The on location filming in New York had a nice documentary look to it, but the film was spoiled by an obnoxious jazz score which sounded like a parody. Melville himself played one of the two reporters and wasn't too bad, unfortunately every time he jumped into a car to check out the next clue the music blasted out on the soundtrack to alert the viewer something was about to happen. A good filmmaker but apparently a real character. Melville was known for wearing sunglasses and a trench coat which made him look like a movie detective. Melville was also known for wearing a cowboy hat while directing to add to his aura of quirkiness.

Melville knew he had failed with this film. After taking a couple of years off to rethink his approach to filmmaking, Jean-Pierre Melville came back with a series of impressive crime films.

 85 minutes.

1940 - THE GHOST BREAKERS, Bob Hope's Night of the Living Dead

Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard's follow up to their hit film The Cat and the Canary. This is another comedy/thriller. The very Caucasian Goddard improbably plays the heiress to a spooky mansion near Cuba called Black Island. There are strange rumors of voodoo and a zombie is running around on the island to complicate things a little more. Hope goes along to protect her and solve the mystery. 

 

 

Bob Hope gets to toss off the one liners and Paulette Goddard does a decent job not playing her part as a whimpering frightened female. Probably the only uncomfortable part of the movie is the African American actor Willie Best as Hope's manservant. He's funny and saves the day but the racial stereotyping is tough to sit through.

 

  

 Coming in under 90 minutes the movie is entertaining if undemanding. 

 

 

 

Written by Walter DeLeon and Hope's uncredited gag writers, the running time is 83 minutes.

 

1928 - Male/Female relationships Von Stroheim's THE WEDDING MARCH

Von Stroheim's 1928 film is a love story about an impoverished Prussian Prince who falls in love with a lower middle class woman but is forced by circumstance to marry the daughter of a rich industrialist. The entire story was filmed with great detail and glowing photography, it's a sophisticated but perverted film. Although the Prince's love for the woman Mitzi appears to be genuine, the Prince is hardly a likable leading man in the traditional sense. Scenes throughout the film show the Prince spending time in a bordello and it's clear he has been sleeping with the chambermaid at his parent's home. Even the beginning of his love scene with Mitzi is played next to a statue of the crucifix.

The other major male character, the butcher, who is in love with Mitzi is deliberately photographed to look like a pig. His attempted seduction of her towards the end of the film involves lots of unsubtle symbolism with the camera cutting back and forth between the butcher and a live pig running around the butcher shop.

Both female characters have some sort of physical handicap throughout the film. Mitzi, after she first meets the Prince, breaks her leg and hobbles around on a crutch throughout most of the film. The other female character Cecelia, was born with a limp. These details further push Von Stroheim's theme of the exploitation of vulnerable women.

Originally a two part film, the conclusion of the story called The Honeymoon exists only in stills photos, an interesting intelligent film about corruption of the innocent.

1966 - EL DORADO Howard Hawk's self indulgent but highly entertaining western

The screenwriter Leigh Brackett, was so frustrated with Howard Hawks during the production of El Dorado, that she openly referred to the film as "Son of Rio Bravo." But by this point in his career, Howard Hawks was indulging himself to an unparalleled degree. Sticking just about every dumb western cliche and rehash of scenes from his previous films into El Dorado, Howard Hawks was artistically out of control and clearly didn't care.

 

The critics at the time were not impressed with the film and re watching it now it's easy to understand why.  Even the line readings of the actors incorporated some of the famous Howard Hawks overlapping dialog which he had used in his previous films. If Hawks wanted to indulge himself in a trip down memory lane, so be it.

It's interesting to compare the directors Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock at this point in their
careers. Hawks in his early seventies and Hitchcock in his late sixties were winding down their amazing careers with only a few more films left in them.

Their treatment of women in their films at this point in their lives is an interesting contrast between the styles and personalities of these men. Hitchcock pretty much spent the rest of his career sexually obsessing over the actress Tippi Hedren and thinking up inventive ways to stage creepy rape and murder scenes against women in his remaining films

Howard Hawks also had a thing for women and stuck lots of hot looking women in his last couple of films. However Hawks wasn't interested in raping or murdering them, he just had them looking good and talking smart. As he got older, John Wayne no longer wanted to play love scenes with younger women. Hawks made it a point of having Wayne perform with younger actresses to embarrass him.

Hawks cast Robert Mitchum to act opposite John Wayne. Having these two legendary actors and alcoholics play against each other was a great idea. Wayne usually tended to overwhelm most of the actors he played with. But Robert Mitchum had such a strong personality that at times Wayne almost looked like he was underacting. Mitchum recognized the film for what it was, a bunch of foolishness. His mugging and hamming throughout the film was very entertaining.

El Dorado was the the last film photographed by Hal Rosson. Rosson had a long career, he had photographed films like The Wizard of Oz, Singing in the Rain and parts of Gone With The Wind. El Dorado has lots of beautiful old style Hollywood photography particularly with the use of the color yellow to simulate the evening western sky.

Coming in 20 minutes shorter than Rio Bravo, Howard Hawks still had enough tricks left in him to make El Dorado a box office hit with the audience in 1966, but Hawks must have known that times were changing for his kind of film. Still, you could make the argument that El Dorado is a lot more entertaining in many ways than the very pretentious Rio Bravo.

1968 - FINIAN'S RAINBOW, a musical about the invention of the perfect menthol cigarette

At 2 hours and 20 minutes, Finian's Rainbow, is a musical about racism in the South with a magical leprechaun running around. It required several nights of viewing to sit through. 69 year old Fred Astaire was way past his prime and it was a little embarrassing to watch him perform some of the dance numbers. He still had a lot of grace and charm which compensated for his diminished skills as a dancer. 

 

 Tommy Steele as Og the leprechaun always seemed to be one of the most strident musical comedy performers in this history of musicals. He over performs every song in the Liza Minnelli tradition of clobbering the audience over the head to show how talented he is.  

 

 

 There are a lot of nice things about Finian's Rainbow. The score is really good with lots of decent and several very good songs. Petula Clark is also very good playing Astaire's daughter and sings the two best songs in the film. 

The producers wanted a younger director for this musical and hired Francis Ford Coppola to direct. He must have had his hands full with an aging star, an outdated story about sharecroppers living in racial harmony and non existent choreography. Working with a larger budget, the young director had previously only made small independent and cheap films. Coppola staged many of the musical numbers outdoors to bring some movement to the film. This was an approach that Astaire apparently didn't much care for.

 

 Compared to something like Hello Dolly, or Star, Finian's Rainbow at least has some charm to it. Unfortunately the movie was pretty outdated by 1968.

 141 minutes, written by Yip Harburg and Fred Saidy.

1971 - BIG JAKE, John Wayne Movie Pro

64 year old John Wayne has to do all the work in this western.   Bad guys have kidnapped Duke's grandson. Duke's got to get him back. Along with his estranged sons and his trusty Indian sidekick they take off after the bad guys. 

Will Duke succeed?   Get real.

Criticized at the time of release for having a lot of excessive violence in it. This was kind of surprising for a John Wayne movie. The final shootout actually had a Friday the 13th type of unstoppable killer chasing the little kid around. The film did not do particularly well with audiences.

Big Jake was the last appearance of Maureen O'Hara with Wayne, they had only one small scene together which was another disappointment. This movie has run on cable TV so many times that it seems better than it actually is. By this point in his career Wayne was pretty much going through the motions, but he was a pretty strong presence even in a mediocre film like this.

This is probably the type of movie that people think of when they think "John Wayne movie" but he really made better films than this.

1930 - EARTH, they make you watch films like this in film school .

Alexander Dovzhenko's 1930 film on farm collectivism was criticized by the Communist controlled Soviet government for being rigidly and excessively formalist. The Commies may be attempting godless destroyers of our democratic way of life, but as it turns out they were apparently pretty decent film critics.

 

 A story of a farming community that gets a government sponsored tractor to help increase it's output. The film contains endless shots of apples growing on trees, apples glistening in the rain, apples falling out of trees laying on the ground and then there's the series of wheat growing in the field scenes and after that the series of sunflowers growing in the fields. 

 

 With it's meticulous technique in photography and editing, this was hardly going to be a film that the hard working Ukrainian farmers would go to see at their local multiplex. 

 

Oleksandr Dovzhenko aka Alexander Dovzhenko must have been aware that his highly formalist film would have little audience appeal because he included a nude scene towards the end. To little to late.

 Written by Oleksandr Dovzhenko, the running time is 76 minutes.