MAKSQUIBS CINEMATHEQUE: MACABRE (1958)

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Like just about everyone with an interest in the movies, I'm watching more films on DVD and going out to movie houses a lot less. Convenience trumps the better experience.
Of course, you lose audience interaction and the poor film now has to compete with all the comforts of home.
It's a bit like seeing Rembrandts & Titians in a book reproduction, or from posters with iffy color values, no texture or weight to the surface and the wrong dimensions . . . all while snacking on chips & soda. (Oops! You get that at your local cinema,too.)
The ease of instant movie gratification risks turning an art form (well, sometimes) into little more than low-grade eye-candy & mindfodder. So, maybe it's worthwhile to write a bit down on what we're all viewing, just to keep fully engaged.

DVDs: the latest opiate of the people meets the internet, where everyone's a critic.
God help us.

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Tuesday, February 26, 2019

MACABRE (1958)

Schlock-meister William Castle was slipping into tv gigs when he returned to the Big Screen with this first of his Big Gimmick Pics, here a $1000 insurance policy against Death-By-Fright!* Later P.R. triumphs would hot wire a few seats for that Whoopee Cushion jolt of electric fear or post a fake nurse in the lobby for the faint of heart; anything to distract you from the anemic movie accompaniment. This one has William Prince as a bland small-town doctor whose daughter is reported buried alive, possibly in retribution for a pair of botched cases (two sisters dead) and/or the doc’s complicated love life (dead wife, selfish mistress, lovelorn office assistant). Shot with the visual allure of ‘50s anthology tv, at least there’s an amusingly odd perf from Jim Backus as a seen-it-all local police chief among the startlingly bad ones. But with films like this, $1000 ain’t nearly enough.

DOUBLE-BILL: *The second-billed feature on our poster, HELL’S FIVE HOURS/’58 (not seen here), about a nuclear facility taken hostage, looks more interesting than the top of the bill.

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A last thought before we go.

Well, enough from me. But before we sign off, here's a great quote from Emile Zola's L'OEUVRE (THE MASTERPIECE), which is about painting rather than the yet to be invented medium of film, but which points a fine critical eye toward the whole idea of art criticism. It's a good, if chilly, thought to keep in mind, especially when you surf the net.

"Has it ever struck you that posterity may not be the fair, impartial judge we like to think it is?

"Suppose the artist's paradise turned out to be as nonexistent as the Catholics, and future generations prove just as misguided as the present one and persisted in liking pretty pretty dabbling better than honest to goodness painting. There are some accepted masterpieces for which I myself wouldn't give a twopenny damn.

"Classical training has given us a wrong view of everything and forces us to acclaim as geniuses a lot of fellows who are no more than well-balanced, facile painters, while what we might really prefer is the work of more emancipated but less even artists known only to an initiated few. Immortality at present depends entirely on the average, middle-class mind and is reserved only for the names that have been most forcibly impressed upon us while we were still unable to defend ourselves...

"Perhaps that's the sort of thing that's best left unsaid. It's certainly the sort of thing that gives me the shudders!"- Emile Zola

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Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

Tuesday, February 26, 2019

MACABRE (1958)

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A last thought before we go.

DROP ME A LINE