Cinemonkey

Plus sa change ...

As you may know, On the Aisle is no more. The podcast we did for All Classical Portland was cancelled after 300 episodes. All our 30+minute shows hosted by Ed Goldberg and featuring over the years Marc Mohan and many others have been deleted from the website along with about 50 text reviews of movies that I wrote over six years. 

Fortunately some of us landed elsewhere. Stating Friday, the 22nd, the new 30-minute live show Film at 11 made its debut at 10 AM (yes, we know ... what is it called ...). It's hosted by me and Mona Bowen, with numerous guest reviews lined up, from Hallie Z., to KBOO's Fortunato, Open Mike, and Just Jess, and with certain special guests in the works. We feel that we are offering something unique to at least the Portland, Oregon media landscape. 

I also plan on contributing film and DVD reviews to the KBOO blog. They begin with this take on Bardot in Clouzot's La verité. 

The episodes of Film at 11 aired so far are stored on a special page on the KBOO web site, located here. 

 

The Music Man [King of Jazz Criterion Collection]

 

Sometimes the extras are better than the movie.

This is no knock on The King of Jazz, a Universal “revue” musical from 1930. The film is remarkably undated. But King is also the inspiration for infectious accolades from a host of writers and musicians, all evidenced on the new Criterion Collection Blu-Ray, which restores the work to its former colorful, infectious glory. Writer Gary Giddins calls the film an “ice cream sundae of a movie. Delicious.”

The King of Jazz is built around the Paul Whiteman orchestra, which contained some of the best musicians of the time. Whiteman was a guy from Denver with daddy issues, who landed in New York City and rose to become one of the most popular acts of the 1920s. Hollywood summoned, and after a year, the band leader and the executives settled on an approach – an old fashioned revue, a series of skits, musical interludes, blackouts, and solos that highlighted the variety of talents in the orchestra, and the burgeoning versatility of movie sound and color (it’s in two-strip Technicolor).

The label “King of Jazz” was dreamed up by a publicist. To his credit, though, once Whitman got the hang of Manhattan, he realized that the real jazz players were the influx of African-Americans from the south and midwest, and he tried to place them in the band. Objections from his managers put the kibosh on that – he wouldn’t be booked in the South, and not even in some Northern hotels. Whitman’s end run was to hire them as arrangers and background musicians. The upshot is that Whiteman went from a traditional band leader with jazz-inflected portions of the act which let improvisation fly, to a groundbreaker and trendsetter. His “signature” was Rhapsody in Blue, which his musicians introduced, though he later had a falling out with George Gershwin, who does not appear in the film to play the piece.

Less an orchestra, really, than a clutch of interlaced individual acts, the band included numerous masters of their trade. Bing Crosby appears here in his first screen appearance as one of the trio The Rhythm Boys. Other notables include Mike Pingitore, the banjo player, Joe Venuti, the violin player who formed part of the band’s sextet, and John Arledge at the keyboard, along with Charlie Greco. Other performers on parade include the Sisters G, The Bronx Sisters, the Russell Markert Girls (later known as the Rockettes), Al “Rubber Legs” Norman, and Jack Fulton. Actors include Walter Brennan, Slim Summerville, and John Boles, later a screen heartthrob. The precious seconds of Pingitore and Venuti may be the only screen footage of the performers. Arguably the most famous sequence is the performance of “Happy Feet.”

The supplements tell the viewer as much as the disc space allows, and those interested can pursue more information in a book about the making of the film by James Layton and David Pierce, who are represented on the disc.

The best place to start is the video introduction by Giddins, who contextualizes Whiteman and isolates some of the joys of the film (16:50). [Update: the second volume of Mr. Giddins's Bing Crosby biography, covering the war years, is to be published in 2019.] Having seen the movie, the next step is to listen to the audio commentary track, with Giddins as the host, and with color commentary by writer Gene Seymour, and bandleader Vince Giordano. One interesting sidelight comes when Giddins mentions the fad for performers pretending to be kids, such as Fanny Brice doing Baby Snookims. He is baffled as to why and how this trope became popular, but he may have inadvertently isolated the source for Jerry Lewis's creation of 'The Kid."

Then there is an abundance of information and background in the video interview with pianist Michael Feinstein (19:14). Layton and Pierce make their presence felt with four small documentaries: a background piece on Universal Studios (about 10 minutes), some of the problems involved in shooting this color film (also 10 minutes), a brief piece about the animated cartoon opening, and a general “making of” documentary (17 minutes).

The rest of the supplements round out the presentation. You can survey pages of the score for one of the numbers. There are no less than three deleted scenes, comedy skits titled after their punchlines: "Pretty Lucky So Far “(1:30), “Look What it Makes Me“ (0:28), and “Horse’s Neck“ (0:26), three surprisingly dirty jokes that show how far pre-Code Hollywood wanted to go. When the film was re-released later in the 1930s it came with alternative opening titles, also offered here (2:05).

Paul Whiteman and the orchestra are on the periphery of some other supplements. I Know Everybody and Everybody’s Racket, is a short program filler from 1933 with nightlife columnist Walter Winchell playing himself, in a nightclub where the band happens to be playing (21: 07). There are also two Two Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons from 1930, incorporating both music and some animation moments from King of Jazz: My Pal Paul (6:51), and Africa (5:42), with some sad racialist overtones.

Arguably the most interesting of the secondary supplements is All Americans, a sound short from 1929 (19:03). It’s a version of a huge number that was restaged by John Murray Anderson for the inclusive “Melting Pot” number that concludes King of Jazz. Anderson was an innovator and a lot of his work on King of Jazz anticipates choreographer Busby Berkeley, and his camera angles, trick photography (which he supervised but was created by others), and camera movements broke the bonds that films suffered from in the early days of sound. You can see the lasting influence of All Americans and “Melting Pot” in the work of Guy Maddin, who found inspiration from the sequences for his film The Saddest Music in the World, his paean to part-talky and ‘30s musicals.

 

Finally, there is an 22-page insert with cast and crew, transfer information, and an essay by rising film writer and novelist Farran Smith Nehme.

The King of Jazz hits the street Tuesday, 27 March, 2018 ($39.95, Criterion Collection No. 915).

 

 

 

Originally published at All Classical Portland, 25 March 2018

R. Crumb's Genesis at the Art Museum

 

 

Comic book fans, graphic novel intellectuals, line drawing aficionados, surviving hippies, and other area eccentrics have a marvelous opportunity to see the art of R. Crumb, the so-called father of the underground comic, on glorious display at the Portland Art Museum, a touring show that arrives here under the aegis of Bruce Guenther, PAM's chief curator of modern and contemporary art.

In 2005, Crumb signed a contract with W. W. Norton to illustrate the first five chapters of the Bible. Crumb, a lapsed Catholic, explains in the book's introductory matter that though he is not a believer, he is nevertheless fascinated by spirituality and faith, and proclaims in The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book that "I believe in everything ... UFOs, Bigfoot, channeling, ESP ... I believe it all!." As I mention in my review of the The Book of Genesis, there are several other reasons why Crumb may have wanted to tackle the project. One was perhaps the idea of harnessing himself to the restrictions that an adaptation of the Bible would entail. Another motivation might have been to educate readers. The book is also a great technical exercise, and his work may also be a result of his interest in Jewish life. Most of all, though, The Book of Genesis is the end point of a fascination with adaptation that has preoccupied Crumb off and on since the 1980s.

 

 

The Museum puts on display all 207 pages of the comic itself, framed under glass and arranged across a series of rooms subdivided with sometimes diagonal hallways that tend to run left to right. Each area is color-coded with strong "comic book" colors, and the patron is first greeted by a black and white stand up cut out of Crumb in his stoop postured and gap-mouthed cartoon persona. From the very first pages, which are not that much bigger than the printed version, the viewer can see the detail and care that Crumb brought to the project. Nary a panel lacks a trace of Liquid Paper, which Crumb used to fix text or rejigger aspects of the frame. Some of the most amazing panels occur in the fiery death of Gomorrah, and one of the most striking panels occurs at the bottom of page 44, Chapter 15, when Abram has a night of sleepless dread. The ghostly faces hovering over Abram's head baffle the viewer wondering how Crumb achieved that effect, which looks much better in person than in the finished book.

A typical comic book page not only has to have well-composed panels within it, but the panels on the page must all work together cohesively and carry the eye. By putting the pages in reverse order, so to speak, the Museum has defeated the two-page spread effect that Crumb labored at, and emphasizes the lines and coordination of single page of panels. For the full effect, the reader is directed to consult the book, where Crumb's seemingly effortless command of layout is in full flower.

In addition to the original pages, much of Crumb's research material is on display beneath transparent boxes. These objects include frame enlargements from de Mille's The 10 Commandments, collected clippings of people, animals, "slaves," and landscapes for reference, and early educational comic book versions of Bible that Crumb drew upon. A display shows a group of images that were the source for Crumb's version of God, including Charleton Heston as Moses from The 10 Commandments. One of the treats of the exhibition is a black and white alternative cover, found in the final room.

Only 60 years ago the vulgarity and violence of comic books was under attack from psychologists and government agents. Today, the work of one of the form's greatest practitioners is on display in a museum as if it were art, which clearly it is. That comics are now published in hard covers is itself a tremendous advance from the poorly printed pulp pages of the past. The marriage of Crumb and the most sacred book in history is a strange meeting of high and low culture in a unique and powerful blend.

 

 

 

Now I wish two things, that someone will buy the film rights, and that will Crumb come to town and talk about the book and his art.

The Bible Illuminated: R. Crumb's Book of Genesis is on display from June 12, 2010 to September 19, 2010, at the Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park Avenue, Portland, Oregon 97205, 503.226.2811.

 

 

 

Originally printed in the Vancouver Voice, June 2010. 

A Head for Crime [Headhunters]

 

 

 

Fashions in detective Fiction seem to go in waves. There was the long Agatha Christie polite mystery, followed by the overlapping hardboiled school. In recent years there has been the “novelty” detective (dwarf, blind, Russian cop), followed by the grim realism of James Ellroy and Don Winslow, among others, which is the current standard.

In the past 10 years, though, the Scandinavian thriller has come to the fore. The First Scandinavian mysteries popular in English were the 10 “Martin Beck” police procedurals by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, many turned into American adaptations and also a series of homegrown TV shows. The Danish TV series Forbrydelsen is one of the best shows on any television ever, and has been turned into the slow paced American knock off, The Killing. In 1992, Danish author Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (Smilla’s Sense of Snow) was an international best seller (and a dull movie), and while in recent years, the obvious leader is the Dragon Tattoo series, which also drew attention to the work of Henning Mankell, Arnaldur Indriðason, Ann Holt, and numerous others in what is being called Scandinavian noir or when they come to the movies what I like to call film glacée.

 

Scandinavian noir films, such as Insomnia, are notable for usually being procedurals, often with political or social cause backdrops, a wide range of social strata examined (like the hardboiled school), and with troubled or disturbed main characters out of Dostoevsky. As with the Martin Beck books, they offer internal critiques of the “Socialist dream states” of the north, especially the bureaucracy and myopia, and the women have none of the Christian inhibitions of the U. S. or England when it comes to nudity, sexuality, multiple partners, and even crime. The latest recipient of readership loyalty is the Norwegian Jo Nesbø. Yellow Bird, the same company that adapted the Dragon Tattoo novels, has made a film of one of his stand alone novels, Headhunters, though most of his books feature the series character Harry Hole.

 

 

Taking a page from Patricia Highsmith, Headhunters tells of a successful businessman, the unusually named Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie, who has the cadaverous look of Steve Buscemi), who has a sideline in art theft, if only to keep his beautiful wife Diana (Synnøve Macody Lund, who, like Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut, is introduced in all her coltish beauty in a bathroom) in the finery he thinks she demands. Brown is rather on the short and gargoyleïsh side, at least in his view, and he needs all the edge he can to keep his wife interested – when in fact, all she wants is a child. In daily life, Brown is a recruitment executive, a headhunter for major corporations. At his wife’s art gallery, Brown meets one Clas Greve (TV’s Nikolaj Coster- Waldau, from Game of Thrones), who strikes Brown as a likely candidate for a computer company in search of a CEO. Greve seems even more attractive when Brown learns that the man inherited a rare Reubens from a relative. Little does Brown know, at first, that Greve is also a “headhunter” – hence the plural title.

 

More should not be said of this tale that relies on turnabouts and revelations as Brown slips from one predicament to another.[1] The director is Morten Tyldum who is working from a script by frequent collaborator Lars Gudmestad, and the film seems to be loyal to the text. As with other Yellow Bird films, the technical credits are high, but unlike the second two Dragon movies, the pace is lively, with the characters continually rooted in realistic elements, despite the usually heightened events of a thriller. The film in fact requires careful attention to its meticulous structuring. Few causal remarks, such as someone saying that they have a fear of dogs, are needlessly placed, and the theme of “heads” and “hunting” are a common theme, fully woven into the film’s texture.

 

Still, Headhunters isn’t probably the best introduction to Scandinavian noir. It’s more of an Elmore Leonard type tale than an examination of northern social problems and congenitally unhappy people – though in one sequence Roger comes home to find Diana watching The Girl Who Played with Fire on TV. Apparently, like the Dragon movies before it, Nesbø’s novel is to be turned into an American movie at some point, so the subtitle-reading-averse will still be able to get the story.

 

1 Though I will add that Headhunters becomes the fourth of only four films I can think of in which a character is submerged in human feces. The others are Seven Beauties, The Shawshank Redemption, and Schindler’s List. Interestingly the other three are all prison films, and two of them are set in concentration camps.

Posted at All Classical on April 28, 2012 by D. K. Holm

CSI on Star Trek

Friday May 7: Star Trek ... Next Day Air Hip hop tale of two thieves who are accidental recipients of a cocaine cache. Friday May 15: Angels and Demons ... Management Jennifer Aniston and Steve Zahn star in this comedy about unlikely love between a slacker and a high powered professional. Shot in Oregon ... Still Green Yet another tale of high schoolers staging one last blast before hitting college. Friday May 22: Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian Security guard Ben Stiller must sneak into the national museum in order to rescue two of his museum's ghostly residents, shipped there accidentally ... The Girlfriend Experience Steven Soderbergh's new movie is more Bubble than Oceans's 11 as it examines the life and commerce of a high class call girl in New York ... Dance Flick The latest parody of recent films and genres from the Wayans Brothers ... Friday May 29: Drag Me to Hell Stephen King-like tale of a loan officer given a curse by an aged lady she declines. Sam Raimi directs and co-writes... Up Disney animated comedy about a aged balloonitic taken an airborn trip to South America... The Brothers Bloom Two con men ( Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo) attempt to fleece a rich girl (Rachel Weisz ) in this crime comedy from Rian Johnson (Brick).

 

 

A recent episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation posed a satiric homage to Star Trek and its fans. In it, two of the heretofore minor characters, lab rat Hodges (Wallace Langham), who is so minor that chief cop Jim Brass doesn't know who he is when he calls from a crime scene, and biochemist Wendy Simms (Liz Vassey), accidentally meet, and stumble upon a crime scene, at a convention for a show called Astro Quest. There a producer is murdered for taking the long-cancelled Astro Quest and updating it into a messy, dirty, violent Battlestar Galactica-style TV show of despair and pain, to the ire of good old “Questers” (and look for BSG's co-creator along with star Grace Park among the outraged fans; in addition BSG scribe David Weddle co-wrote the episode).

In this in-joke littered episode, Hodges fantasizes being the Captain Kirk equivalent and eyeing Simms in various costumes and settings. By the end, Simms has started equally fantasizing, and after the loving parody the show makes the point that Star Trek and shows and movies like it provided a propitious funnel of feelings for otherwise frustrated people of all stripes. nerd or normal. Trekkers may be the original Incels.

The homage was perfectly timed, as J. J. Abrams reconstitution of the Paramount franchise is set to open on May 5. The new rendition raises once again the mystery over why Star Trek has had such a hold over a generation of viewers. The show wasn't all that popular when it aired originally for three seasons in the mid-'60s, and NBC cancelled it in June 1969. Its life continued in syndicated reruns and an animated version, and eventually the executives at Paramount realized that there might be something in the franchise, especially after the rise of Trek conventions and a letter writing campaign by fans. That resulted in, among other things, a feature film reuniting the show's cast, a tepid stodgy affair directed by Robert Wise in 1979, which made it clear that the old codgers at the studio still didn't understand what they had. Eventually, though, perhaps thanks to the popularity of Star Wars, other movies and new TV series re-captivated the next generation of audiences.

What did those original viewers like about the show? Was a love of camp the motivation, or was it sci-fi nerd kids who had dreamed of having their interests finally represented on TV rejoicing in even a pallid reflection of their desires? The sets were cheesy and the acting bombastic, and like science fiction of the '50s and '60s each episode was really a social protest moral statement about matters of the time such as over population and nuclear escalation. The multi-ethnic cast promoted a form of easy liberal universalism.

J. J. Abrams has become something of a franchise savior. Though his own program Alias had a cult it struggled, but his vision for Lost took off when he was commissioned to take it over. He went on to reify Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible series, and now turns his guns on Star Trek, which, like other recent sequels such as the James Bond series, goes back to the beginning and starts over. The film has all the familiar names, but in larval form and with new faces: James T. Kirk (teen movie star Chris Pine), Spock (TV's Zachary Quinto), Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy (Karl Urban), Scotty (British comedian Simon Pegg), Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Sulu (John Cho) and Chekov (Anton Yelchin). Winona Ryder also stars, and the bombastic villain is an unrecognizable Eric Bana as the destructive Nero.

Expect the movie to include typical Abrams narrative touches such a fixation on parental figures and romances rife with secrets. Abrams, a stated non-Trek fan, will probably not include in-jokes or homages to the original show. The emphasis will be on action and suspense, "facing your fears" Baywatch-style psychology, and less on ideas and social protest. But will Abrams show the kind of affection that the CSI episode unveiled? Probably not. It will be interesting to see what hardcore Trek fans make of the exercise.

And speaking of cults such as Star Trek, one of the most interesting and the most long lived is the affection for the icy, imperious Sherlock Holmes. The character is so beloved that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 60-some stories with the consulting detective weren't enough and over the last 100 years writers who felt they could do just as good a job have created pastiches with similarly named sleuths or with Holmes and Watson themselves once again at center stage. One of the most clever pastiches, however, is David Pirie's approach. The British novelist and horror film historian went back to the roots of the character and created a series based on Doyle himself, and his Watson-like apprenticeship to Dr. Joseph Bell, the real life model for Holmes.

In a series of novels, and in two TV movies based on them, Pirie explored the foundation of the Holmes myth in the real life circumstances of Doyle's life. Now two of the films are out on DVD, with the late Ian Richardson (who played Sherlock Holmes in two TV adaptations in the 1980s) as Dr. Joseph Bell and Robin Laing as the young Scottish medical student Doyle.

Murder Rooms imagines how Doyle met Bell and became his fascinated acolyte as Bell makes himself available to the local constabulary as a consultant on difficult cases. One episode gives some background on a difficult case that confounds both men and leads to romantic disillusionment on Doyle's part and a first interest in spiritualism.

It's clear what attracts readers and viewers to Holmes. It's familiar. It was cozily familiar back in the late 1800s when the stories first began to appear, and remained familiar through renditions by Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett and countless others.

Originally published in the Vancouver Voice April 2009.

Rolling Presses and Filofax

 

 

At the end of State of Play as the credits roll, the main characters wearily but with a certain sense of satisfaction walk off into the shadows, but the movie, like a cheapjack version of Antonioni's La Notte, chooses to follow the path of the story they have just completed as it makes its way from preparation to paper, and we watch as huge rolls are tuned into individual folded newspapers that make their way across the press room like so many atavars in a game of Chutes and Ladders.

As I watched this elegiac exercise, as I watched the huge, cumbersome, slow, wasteful machinery of the modern newspaper grind into action, I pondered the movies lament for the passing of the old ways and it was difficult for me to suppress the feeling, "Good riddance!"

Remember the Filofax? That was the glorified wallet that contained a yuppie's whole life, a kind of file folder and address book in one. They were expensive, and once you had one, you were required to purchase equally expensive annual updates. There was even a Jim comedy based on the horror of losing one's Filofax, called Filofax for a time, before a name changed to Taking Care of Business (1990). Within a decade or less, the Filofax was superseded by the personal computer and all many of subsequent portable digital storage spaces. Whenever I think of the Filofax, I think of the scene in Other People's Money in which Danny DeVito brandishes a buggy whip before a group of stockholders as an example of well-crafted but left behind technology.

 

Originally published in the Vancouver Voice, February 2010

Unforced Errors: Recent Hitchcock Books, No. 2

 

There are already over 200 or many more books on Alfred Hitchcock in English alone, maybe more, and multitudes more in other languages, including Guillermo del Toro’s hard-to-find Hitchcock (EDITORIAL ESPASA CALPE, S.A (2008). These books began appearing in the mid-1950s when Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer wrote the first full-length critical study. Ten years later came the first study in English, Robin Wood’s still masterly Hitchcock’s Films. By the time Hitchcock died in 1980, there was already a hefty shelf’s worth, and they continued to appear, but for some reason lately there has been an acceleration of books on the director. Four recent volumes chart the scope of books about him. One is a biography, the second a Hollywood memoir, then a long book essay considering the life and work, and finally a detailed critical study taking on specific elements of the films.

Peter Ackroyd’s Alfred Hitchcock: A Brief Life (Nan A. Talese, 288 pages, $26.95, ISBN-13: 978- 0385537414) is a beginner’s guide to the director’s life and films. Ackroyd is a specialist in all things London and has written big books on the city and the river that runs through it and has published many biographies, of Dickens and others. There is no original research here, and no particularly gripping insights into how the films work, and this leads to a lot of revived opinions and unhelpful myths being perpetuated, among them the claim that Hitchcock assaulted Tippi Hedren on the sets of The Birds and Marnie.

In a similar book, the case is rehashed again, but at least from the horse’s mouths. Tippi Hedren’s Tippi: A Memoir (William Morrow, 288 pages, $15.99, ISBN-13: 978- 0062469038) is a dictated Hollywood autobiography that covers some of the same ground as the actress’s earlier book on lion conservation, along with remarks she made to Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto and to Camille Paglia in her BFI book on The Birds, all about Hitchcock’s supposed sexual harassment of her during the making of two films. Her claims have achieved the status of fact, so much so that Richard Brody could write about it in the otherwise-famously-fact-checked New Yorker as true, and HBO even aired a TV movie on the topic. Spoto’s goal was to peek inside to the inner turmoil that drove Hitchcock, and Hedren’s then-claims folded perfectly with that aim. But the situation is much more complicated, and much less easy to determine, despite Miss Hedren’s comments. Patrick McGilligan has the most rational approach to the case in his more recent biography of Hitchcock and Tony Lee Moral has the most detail in Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie.

My take on the situation is that the actress was a prudish uptight person not equipped to deal with Hitchcock’s raciness, jokes, and sometimes coarseness of manner. Alma was the person who pointed out Hedren to Hitchcock in a TV commercial, and the negotiations to take on her as a contract player were not hampered by her inexperience, or her weird squeaky voice. Clearly the two had a falling out, but the foundation seems more to be about a contract dispute and her resentment of Hitchcock’s trying to shape her image, in the manner of the old studio days, rather then the possibility of a proposition, or his forcing himself on her in the back of a limo. She did complain to Marni’s screenwriter, and to one of her co-stars, but the tension was not necessarily sexual based, and could have been really just boss-employee issues. Hedren writes that Alma apologized to her about Hitchcock’s behavior, and Hedren supposedly demanded that she do something about it, but again, was Alma voicing awareness of a sexual obsession, or referring to the tensions that enveloped the second half of the Marnie shoot? Yes, Hitchcock called Hedren The Girl, but that was a convention of British cinema and its stereotypes, a shorthand. Yes, Hitchcock worked with some of the most beautiful women in the world, but he also knew sides of them never exposed to the public, and had to wade into show business’s less savory facets having to do with the financial economy of beauty and profit. There are numerous recordings of Hitchcock’s discussions with Hedren, available at the Academy library, and there he called her by her name. According to McGilligan, when Hitchcock wouldn’t let her attend an awards ceremony in Manhattan, she threw a fit and called him a fat bastard. The case has been given even more attention in light of the multitude of prominent men exposed as predators via the Me Too movement.

Frankly, I’m not sure I grasped the point of D. A. Miller’s Hidden Hitchcock (University Of Chicago Press, 208 pages, $22.50, ISBN- 13: 978-0226374673), though it is interesting and even fun to read. Mr. Miller is a UC Berkeley grad school professor, and previously wrote a BFI Classics monograph on Fellini’s 8 1⁄2, and this new volume is a close look at Hitchcock’s meaningful “errors,” and while concentrating on only three films from roughly around the same time, Rope, Strangers on a Train, and The Wrong Man, makes a plug for what he calls the Too-Close Viewer. It’s a complicated and nuanced conceit, and flies in the face of authorial intention. For example Mr. Miller is more interested in the visual jokes that Hitchcock includes, and in continuity errors, and embedded representations of the director. Among the things he focuses on are the joke of Bruno Anthony in Train shown reading a book whose author photo is of Hitchcock himself because it is an anthology he edited. Its companion is a Dell Mapback anthology also edited by Hitchcock, barely seen in Bruno’s compartment. The author is also fascinated by the tilted candle shown in Rope, and the initials D and K revealed in a hat. In Wrong Man he is intrigued by doublings, the ghostly movement of props, and another cameo by Hitchcock sitting in the back row of courtroom. His free associations on these elements lead to some interesting and curious sideways glances at Hitchcock, and though the book could be accused of “reading too much” into what might be a mistake, the book still proves to be an example of just how richly Hitchcock’s films inspire reflection.

Enjoyable as Hidden Hitchcock proved to be, nevertheless I enjoyed the next book the most, probably because I didn’t have to twist my mind around a difficult concept. That next book is Michael Wood’s Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much in the Icons series (New Harvest, 144 pages, $20, ISBN-13: 978-0544456228), which already includes books on David Lynch, Poe, Lucian Freud, Hannah Arendt, Benazir Bhutto, Jesus (by Jay Parini), J.D. Salinger, Van Gogh, and St. Paul. Nice company to be in. Mr. Wood has written studies of Nabokov (with whom Hitchcock once wanted to work), and has a regular movie review column at the London Review of Books, and he has a learned but not academic style that is flexible and roving. On the surface a “conventional” film-by-film survey, which happens to be my favorite genre, Mr. Wood, like Mr. Miller, is strongest in his digressions. In fact, the whole book is like a digression, and merits not only reading, but re-reading. It joins a small cadre of recent books of speculation and free association that includes Peter Conrad’s The Hitchcock Murders, and the volumes by Murray Pomerance, all go-to volumes for insights.

 

 

 

 

Originally posted November 20, 2017 by D. K. Holm at All Classical

Driving Out the Money C h a n g e r s (Danger Diabolique, film and monograph)

 

 

An interesting, foreshadowing moment occurs about an hour and 15 minutes into Danger: Diabolik, the Italian film from 1968 based on the popular comic book. The villain-hero Diabolik (John Phillip Law) has once again foiled his Javert-like nemesis, Inspector Ginko (Michel Piccoli) and as a consequence, the new “Minister of Finance” (the country where he is administrating isn’t exactly specified) has offered a million dollar reward for the capture of the thief. Almost immediately, there follows a montage of explosions as the plinths identifying various tax offices go up in smoke and fragments. This immediately puts the viewer in mind of Fight Club, which ends with a sweeping survey of the city as Club-members take down insurance buildings, banks, and other symbols of economic oppression that keep the male identity weak and docile. Danger: Diabolik anticipated this spirit of anti-corporate anarchy by about 30 years.

 

 

Granted, the virile Diabolik is acting in self-defense. The reward was about to hamper his criminal schemes. And his response works. The new Minister is fired, the country is presumably bankrupt, and the old, equally incompetent Minister (Terry-Thomas) is back in office.

 

 

As a comic strip character, the leather-cat-suited Diabolik was a throwback to Fantômas, the Parisian crime lord who terrorized the city in novels and then in silent serials directed by Louis Feuillade. As Leon Hunt clarifies in his new slim monograph about the film, Danger: Diabolik was at the forefront of various remakes and inspirations based on the spirit of Fantômas, including remakes of the original, several lines of adult Italian comic books borrowing both from Fantômas and Diabolik, other comic book inspired pop culture films such as Barbarella, and much more.

 

Professor Hunt’s new Danger: Diabolik (Cultographies) (Walllower Books-Columbia University Press, 128 pages, $15, ISBN-13: 978-0231182812) is the latest in a series of single title monographs that cover what the French call film maudit, or disreputable movies, and what here we call trash, grindhouse garbage, and in general films that another book in the series could offer as a general title, Bad Taste (Jim Barratt’s volume on the Peter Jackson horror comedy). Other films covered in the Cultographies series include They Live (D. Harlan Wilson), Quadrophenia (Stephen Glynn), Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Dean J. DeFino), Frankenstein (Seattle’s Robert Horton), Blade Runner (Matt Hills), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Ian Cooper),The Evil Dead (Kate Egan), Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Glyn Davis), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock), Donnie Darko (Geoff King), This Is Spinal Tap (Ethan de Seife) and more recently, books on The Shining (Kevin J. Donnelly), Stranger Than Paradise (Jamie Sexton), I Spit on Your Grave (David Maguire defending what many consider the indefensible), Serenity (Frederick Blichert), The Holy Mountain (Alessandra Santos), Ms. 45 (Alexandra Heller- Nicholas), and Argento’s Deep Red (Alexia Kannas). As you can see, there is variety to that legion of titles that the mainstream culture deems, or used to consign to, garbage. Instead, this list is enough to inspire most film students into hysterics of ecstasy. Collect them all!

 

 

Leon Hunt was a contributor to the last physical issue of the influential Movie, a UK publication that focused on close readings of mostly Hollywood films, and whose last issue was No. 36 (recently the publication has been revived as a digital magazine out of the University of Warwick). Mr. Hunt’s contribution to that last issue was a late career survey of Vincent Price’s horror films, and he had fascinating, insightful things to say about tensions between the screen icon and his material and its directors, certain values found consistently among the roles, and the issue of campiness as embedded in self-mocking meta-horror.

 

Mr. Hunt might have gone on to write for Movie further, if the magazine hadn’t fallen into hiatus. On the other hand, he brought an historicism to his essay which matched that of C. G. Crisp, who wrote a book on Truffaut for the Movie series of now-sought-after out-of-print books. The more famous Movie contributors, such as the late Robin Wood and V. F. Perkins, embodied the spirit of close “textual” detail, mostly attending to mise-en-scene and editing (without foregoing story or actorial contributions, of course). Hunt and Crisp may not have fallen into that "pure" category, although their writings are rife with scrutiny of shots, gestures, and point of view. Hunt went on to become Senior Lecturer in Film and TV Studies at Brunel University and write or edit British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation (1998), Kung Fu Cult Masters: From Bruce Lee to Crouching Tiger (2003), BFI TV Classics: The League of Gentlemen (2008), Cult British TV Comedy: From Reeves and Mortimer to Psychoville (2013), East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film (2008) and Screening the Undead: Vampires and Zombies in Film and Television. Crisp became Colin Crisp, who until his recent retirement was Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Griffith University in Brisbane, and has published a series of excellent books on French cinema from the ‘30s through to the ‘60s, published mostly by Indiana University Press.

 

Danger: Diabolik, the book, is one of the best I’ve read so far in the series. Its 128 pages are packed with information, facts, figures, speculation, analysis, and cultural connections. Want to know why the name “Diabolik” has a “K” in it, and how the name is properly pronounced in Italian? Interested in subtle differences between international cuts of the film? Were you aware that there was a proposed earlier version of Diabolik, with Jean Sorel and at one point Catherine Deneuve? The text is a indeed like a “biography” of the film, tracing antecedents and then its influence. Professor Hunt summarizes the history of the comic book itself, created by two sisters already in publishing, Angela and Luciana Giussani, how the film works, the influence of James Bond on the movie, which ultimately was directed by Mario Bava in what was probably his biggest budget ever, and the aftermath, more specifically the cult that has grown around first the film, then Bava, perhaps even more important the cult around the film’s composer Ennio Morricone (in one of his most varied scores), and finally the comic book itself. Culture quotations include the inclusion of Danger: Diabolik in a Beastie Boys music video, the film’s place in the pantheon of parodies by Mystery Science Theater 3000, and in CQ, Roman Coppola’s homage to European pop cinema from the 1960s.

 

 

 

Among the fascinating facets of the film are the moral contours of its hero-thief, the rich relationship between the mysterious Diabolik and his partner Eva Kant (Marisa Mell), and the aesthetic tennis game between producer Dino De Laurentiis, who was thinking big, and Bava, who was used to making magic out of slim budgets. The film’s visual scale is amazing given its limitations, though viewers today may laugh at the rear projection chase scenes. Hunt notes that the movie comes in three large parts, equivalent to three issues of the comic book rather than a a fully plotted out Poliziotteschi, which was a certain kind of Italian crime film that emerged shortly after DD and the “demise” of the giallos. The three parts, in fact, explore the anarchism behind Diabolik’s greed. In the movie, he is less interested in wealth than in tweaking the stuffed shirts chasing him, and in bringing down the civic hierarchies. Diabolik likes to put on a disguise and attend press conferences about himself, which he then turns into mockeries of the officials. He bravely feigns death at one point, only to reassert his superiority over the lumbering professionals hovering over him. His blowing up of the tax institutions and subsequent theft of the replacement gold ingot is motivated by a desire to make it all stop. He wants to bring down society – but really for his own seeming profit.

 

 

The first part of DD concentrates on a cash transfer heist, which establishes Diabolik’s wit and methods. The second part concerns the theft of a priceless necklace, which focuses on Diabolik’s relationship with Eva, whom he adores and pampers, and who in turn worships him. They are equals, and she has equal operative cunning. The third part expands the systems of transportation that the film exploits, in this case trains and ships, as Diabolik fetches the huge gold bounty he has contrived to send to the bottom of a lake. In the film’s dreamy anarchy, Ginko is impotent to stop him, until the very last sequence, but a breaking of the fourth wall indicates that Diabolik isn’t down and out yet, and that the producers may have assumed that the Diabolik series might attain James Bond level iterations. Well, there wasn’t a second Barbarella, either.

 

 

As in the anarchic parody of Fight Club, Danger: Diabolik explores, consciously or not, shades of masculinity, ranging from the potent lovemaking of D, to the just not quite good enough braininess of Ginko, the humorless lethality of the villains that harass Diabolik and Eva in part two, and the cluelessness of officialdom in toto. This celebration of all that is opposed to fatuousness, fibbing, and cultural vacuity in the end shows an at least indirect influence of Mad magazine, that hilarious, mass-culture-undermining seed-bed of the radical left and social protest of the ’60s.

Originally Posted February 27, 2018 by D. K. Holm at All Classical

Hitchcock and the "Third Way" of Understanding Films

 

 

When the BBC released the results of its poll of an unknown number of international critics about their favorite American movies, Alfred Hitchcock made the list five times – for Psycho, North by Northwest, Vertigo, Notorious ... and Marnie (at number 47). This placement sparked the usual groaning. Why Marnie and not Rear Window? Of all the directors represented on the list, Hitchcock was the most likely to have numerous masterpieces between his first American film in 1940, and the last “good ones” in the early 1960s. But Marnie has become a particularly vexatious point of debate among some film quackers over the years, especially since Robin Wood’s Hitchcock’s Films, the first book in English on the director’s career, in which the late scholar dedicated a chapter to defending Marnie from dense critics. Since then, the debate hasn’t died down. Talk about notorious!

The BBC 100 has only re-ignited the controversy. Who were these writers who picked the film and how could it rise so high in the list? For some reason this information is difficult to track down, but then, I’m notoriously bad at Google searches. A synecdoche of the ire the film inspires is one blogger who alternates between year-round Oscar predictions, industry grievances, and proper cinematic sideburns disguised as diary entries. In a few error-filled columns, the blogger ran down Marnie and mocked those who came to its defense. On the other hand, critical luminaries such as Glenn Kenny and Dave Kehr have long been supporters of Marnie.

The debate, or at least the resistance to Marnie as a film worthy of inclusion in an all-time best list exposes an interesting chasm within the critical community, to use the term loosely. Despite the blogger’s call for some kind of weird vigilante attack on Marnie lovers, which unfortunately the Internet is all too easily roused to do these days – for which see the lynch mob mentality over the second season of True Detective, – Marnie is unlikely to go away or its champions be suppressed. There is already one whole book on the making of the film, Marnie figures significantly in the so far hundreds of books on the director, and the latest issue of CineACTION!, the Canadian film journal that Robin Wood helped found 30 years ago, coincidentally features a cover story on Marnie.[1]

The conflict isn’t between “tradition of quality” types like the blogger who finds films such as Shane the pinnacle of Hollywood craft versus the egghead intellectuals with no sense of how an audience interacts with a film, though the conflict is probably in part that. It’s that there is a third way. Yes, some academics do “read too much” into a film particularly if they are drawing upon Freudianism and other bankrupted ideologies. But go back and read the Marnie chapter by Wood, if you have it. It’s a carefully reasoned look at the choices Hitchcock made, with an analysis that if not explaining away such “mistakes” as bad process shots, painted backdrops, and psychological inconsistencies, at least sees them in accord with the overall meaning or seeming ambition of the film’s psychological portrayal. The “third way,” however, is an interest in the director as a person behind a film. The tradition of quality blogger can like North by Northwest as a “well made film” that pleases the audience and was validated as good because people paid to see it [2] – essentially the vantage point of a producer or studio executive, a meddling busybody with snap judgments and easy dismissals, the Rex Reed school of thought. The academic is good at tracking meaning and similarities and progressions of a film though a director’s career as it interacts with the business, the public, and the earlier films, all valuable. The third way, however, asks for great sympathy for a director’s works, both as a whole and individually. So for example, a fan of Samuel Fuller or of Hitchcock and Marnie looks at the film not for its tradition of quality craft but for its expression of the director’s personality. The “sloppiness,” the extremes of quietude and loudness, the psychological flaws are interesting in themselves because they bespeak either passion (as in Fuller) or some kind of inner crisis we can never truly know, as possibly in the case of Hitchcock.[3]

It’s assumed that Hitchcock “identifies” with Mark Rutland, the Sean Connery character who takes an interest in the case of the mysterious, chilly secretary whom he identifies as the robber of one of his colleagues. Like other Hitchcock characters he “rescues” Marnie – although the ending of the film is ambiguous, even somewhat open ended, and anyway, there aren’t that many male rescuers in Hitchcock films outside of Grant in Notorious, women being usually in that position. What if in some strange way Hitchcock identified with Marnie? That Marnie and Marnie herself represent Hitchcock’s struggle with the terror of sex, and who, like Marnie, chose a life of “crime, making films that are usually about thieves, murderers, and spies? From a position such as this, one can “forgive” a director many a “mistake” or break from the prevailing definition of the well-made film, a definition that shifts from decade to decade or from new technology to new technology. The results are that Hitchcock’s movies, like Kubrick’s, often look better out of their time, than in them.

 

[1] It’s a reprint from the massive book A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock.

 

[2] Hitchcock himself in interviews all too often took box office as validation over critical enthusiasm.

 

[3] By the way, until there is one other witness than Tippi Hedren to the alleged sexual harassment of which she charges him, I will remain dubious, as does Patrick McGilligan in his definitive bio of Hitchcock.

Originally posted at All Classical on 11 August 2015

Out of the Past: Glasgow Courier, 2 October 2017, Cult of Chucky

 

By D. K. HOLM

FOR THE COURIER

 

 

The major release this week at The Worx (700 ½ 1st Avenue North, 406-228-4474) is Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, an entry that proves that dead franchises won't shut up, as this series becomes as loud and blurred as the Transformers movies.

 

 

Also on hand is the incredibly stupid A Ghost Story whose content is as bland as its title. This is a film in which the ghosts actually are sheets with holes cut out, and it's the kind of highbrow horror film in which the camera is content to simply sit and stare, as a widow (a gaunt Mara sister) sits and eats a pie, or methodically drags a couch out to the side of the street for pickup. Fascinating! The only good thing about this dull enterprise is that being draped, the viewer doesn't have to actually see the dread sexual harasser Casey Affleck (he has settled several cases), though one can still hear that squeaky, rasping, mumbling "voice."

 

 

For the British Heritage freaks there is Churchill, in what seems like the latest of about 17 new Churchill-WWII-Dunkirk films. This one has Brian Cox and Miranda Richardson as Mr. and Mrs. C., and is a hagiographic knee-pad movie, with soaring music – or at least notes … movies don't feature actual melodies anymore – in which Churchill feels veddy veddy bad about all the lads he sent to die, and simple children revive his spirit with V-fingers, while those he berates continue to “love” him. In general the film pretends that the American military leadership were stupid until Churchill came along to sort them all out and save Operation Overlord, when in un-re-written history Churchill was blithe about sending men to die en masse, re: Gallipoli. The movie is bogged down by re-stating the same damn argument every five minutes, between Churchill and Eisenhower, then the King, his wife, Montgomery, Smuts, and on and on, always about his not wanting to send men to their doom. On the other hand, TV’s John Slattery is excellent as a combative Ike.

 

 

Finally, there is Cult of Chucky, the seventh Child’s Play film, and with an eighth poised for an appearance. I imagine that most viewers lost track of the series after the second or third, or at least the one with Jennifer Tilly. She’s back though as the lethal doll’s moll, and the killing ground is an antiseptic mental hospital where a young woman blamed for earlier killings is doing time. Naturally, Chucky shows up thanks to an insensitive shrink, and soon the monster bifurcates a few times to other collectibles dolls and human beings, creating the “cult.” Some of the “kills” are funny, in that paradox of gore films, and Brad Dourif as the voice of Chucky has some dandy Bondian quips. Entertainingly grim as Cult is, one does wonder why we as a culture need films in which helpless women are preyed upon by unpunished evil. Clearly a great many men in this society want women but can't get them and so take it out on the gender with fantasies of mass slaughter. Happy times!

 

As usual, no word on what the Valley Cinemas (600 2nd Avenue South 406-228-9239) is showing, though the website http://polsontheatres.com/glasgow-mt/ will know at some point. The theater may hold over The Lego Ninjago Movie, and / or Kingsman: The Golden Circle, the busy, noisy sequel, or it might add anything from among a list that includes Tom Cruise in American Made, a funny, manic real life comedy, or the drama The Glass Castle. Coins will be flipped.

 

Next week I’ll celebrate the release of the Montana-set Certain Women on Criterion DVD.