ACROSS THE UNIVERSE (2007)

Using the Beatles song catalog as an anchor to carry us thru the tumultuous late ‘60s may sound like an untenable, not to say pretentious idea, but the big surprise of Julie Taymor’s ACROSS THE UNIVERSE is that it’s even worse than you imagined. Making the song lyrics concrete (Jo-Jo, Lucy, Prudence, Jude, Sadie are just some of the character names) makes reductio ad absurdum hash of every phrase. You live in fear of the next inevitable song cue. But it’s mainly Taymor’s exhausting imagination that wears you out. She’s like a whole classroom of over-achieving Performing Arts honor kids. The story is not all that different than HAIR (best buds, Pop music, Vietnam, protests), but the soul of the film isn’t too far removed from the ghastly, infamous 1978 SGT. PEPPER film. Surprisingly, taking inflation into account, this film did just as poorly, yet somehow (no doubt because of the great on-stage success of THE LION KING) Taymor has become a critical untouchable. Even when she's the biggest bore in town. Yet at the very end of the film, she discards all the hyper-technical apparatus and pulls off a finale that’s simple & lovely. Where had this sensible person been hiding for the previous 2 hours?

BEFORE I HANG (1940)

Boris Karloff, condemned on a euthanasia charge, uses the weeks before his hanging to perfect his anti-aging serum – on himself! When his punishment is commuted to life-in-prison, he watches as time’s winged warrior backtracks . . . until those nasty side-effects start kicking in. Megger Nick Grinde pulls off a few noirish feints, but most of the film looks as blandly efficient & unstylish as episodic ‘50s tv. Watch for a neat scene where you expect Karloff to lose control as he listens to a friend playing Chopin. (Will he slam down the cover on his old friend’s hands?) And unlike Vincent Price, his successor in the horror genre who grew carelessly hammy over the years, Karloff continued to put a lot of thought & feeling into increasingly routine roles, honoring his craft to the extent circumstances allowed.

BORN RECKLESS (1930)

This early John Ford ‘Talkie’ has a fair share of knockabout charm to it in between the laborious dialogue-heavy dramatics typical of this transition period. (Dialogue director Andrew Bennison is a likely culprit for the deadly pacing,) Edmund Lowe, who seems unrelated to his ultra-Italian family, is part of a gang of jewelry thieves who get sent to fight in WWI rather than face burglary charges. He comes home a hero and establishes a successful night club/speakeasy, but still loses the girl of his dreams to a WASPy type. Years later, when that girl finds her child kidnapped, Lowe is the man she turns to for help. It’s all faintly ridiculous, but you can see how effective it must have been at the time (and still occasionally is) during a few closely staged shoot-outs, tight car chases thru city streets and in some timeless service comedy stuff (look for Ward Bond) & ethnic gags that still hit their marks. If only the actors would pick up their cues!

THE MAN THEY COULD NOT HANG (1939)

By the late ‘30s, Boris Karloff had slipped to Grade B programmers @ Columbia. In this one, after a lumpy first act, we touch a level of perversity that might have pleased Lon Chaney & Todd Browning, even under the helm of the justly named Nick Grinde. Karloff is testing a sort of suspended-animation procedure on a willing subject when the police stop him from reviving the man. Arrested for murder and sentenced to death, his own experiment revives him after execution. Now, he lives only to avenge those who done ‘im wrong, killing them off one by one. Alas, the first six victims (members of the jury) are offed off-stage and the rest are herded together in quasi Agatha Christie/TEN LITTLE INDIANS style that leaves too many miserable contract players on their feet at the finale. But the script, by former D. W. Griffith lenser Karl Brown, gives off a pleasingly creepy chill.

PILGRIMAGE (1933)

John Ford acolytes overrate this title about an obstinate widow (Henrietta Crosman) who sends her only son off to WWI to keep him from marrying the ‘wrong’ girl.’ It’s fascinating to see the warring influences of F. W. Murnau & D. W. Griffith fighting for the great director’s soul (the film is physically stunning with a shockingly blunt death scene in the war trenches), but the inconsistencies in story construction & acting end up begging rather then earning our response. The third act feels entirely contrived. It all might have worked better with an actress less stage-oriented than Henrietta Crosman in the lead. She’s far more comfortable as matriarch of the Barrymore/Drew clan in George Cukor’s THE ROYAL FAMILY OF BROADWAY/’30. (As a pipe smoking mom who is also taking the 'pilgrimage' to honor lost sons, Lucille LaVerne shows just what Ford hoped to get out of Crosman.) Watch for a European village set that’s left over from Ford’s WWI silent ‘mother-love’ epic (FOUR SONS/'28) and enjoy the acting of a cute kid named Jay Ward who grew up to create Rocky & Bullwinkle.

NOTE: Although it’s relatively stagebound & not currently on DVD, try to see John Cromwell’s THE SILVER CORD (from the same year; w/ Irene Dunne, Joel McCrea, Frances Dee, Eric Linden & Laura Hope Crews all giving peak perfs) for a far stronger take on the dangers of ‘Mother-Love.’

THE BLACK ROOM (1935)

House megger Roy William Neill, who churned out those handsome updated Sherlock Holmes pics @ Universal, can’t maintain a consistent visual style in this Boris Karloff thriller made @ Columbia in their Poverty Row days. The production shifts awkwardly from large sets & hordes of extras to cramped sound stages with cycloramas out of a High School drama club. The familiar story involves twin brothers (one Good/one Bad) who are the cursed heirs to a duchy. The story & effects are nicely worked out and it’s tremendous fun watching Karloff attempting to look alternately benign and benighted with the same overenthusiastic smile. If only Columbia had better contract players for him to play with. Watch for the tricky reveal shot which features an extreme zoom lens shot rare for the period. Nice.

SUPERMAN (1941-43)

The SUPERMAN strip was only a few years old when Paramount started their series of one-reel animated shorts via Max & Dave Fleischer. The gorgeous results can be seen in reasonably good condition in the BOSKO/Image COMPLETE SUPERMAN COLLECTION. The Fleischer Brothers’ inordinately lux production scheme probably got them axed about halfway thru the 17 titles, you’ll easily spot the falloff in detail & characterization, but even the least episode is worth checking out while the famously feuding Fleischers gave us four or five masterpieces. No live-action SUPERMAN comes close to the graphic invention seen in these fast moving adventures while the WWII time frame gave the mini-stories an extra charge. And Clark Kent, with barely a line or two per episode, is almost magically caught.

BEDAZZLED (1967)

Don’t let the flop reputation of the recent remake (unseen here) put you off the lightly deranged and wickedly mordant original. Peter Cook & Dudley Moore are in peak condition under Stanley Donen’s nicely unforced direction in this Faust & the Devil story. Hardly the freshest idea, but it feels both comfy & brand new. There are gracefully paradoxical speeches for Cook’s Shavian Devil and a wonderfully eccentric inamorata (Eleanor Bron) for Moore to stumble toward, all set in early Brit-Mod attire. Naturally, each wish goes gleefully off-course and some of the scenes now look like classics (jumping Nuns, flies on the wall, black & white tv pop stars), but don’t underestimate the tiny joys in catching the Devil doling out japeries. A modest, but true delight. (see NOT ONLY BUT ALWAYS  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/not-only-but-always-2005.html ; BEYOND THE FRINGE  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/beyond-fringe-1964.html)

FOUR SONS (1928)

John Ford’s WWI set tear-jerker about a Bavarian widow & her eponymous boys (army man, blacksmith, farmer & herder) works us hard for its tears. While it prefigures Ford’s later work, especially HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY, the sculpted cinematography & expressively mobile camerawork are dead giveaways to the enormous artistic influence German director F. W. Murnau briefly held over mainstream Hollywood. (The magnificent war-front sequence takes place on left-over sets from his SUNRISE.) The first act strenuously sets up the happy little operetta village that will turn dark in wartime and it works because the old sentimental stories made you pay for your tears with devastating losses. Here, sons fight on both sides of the war which was the true life story for cast member Ferdinand Schumann-Heink, son of legendary contralto Ernestine S-H. There’s a structural problem Ford can’t accommodate when Mom emigrates to America after the war, but you’ll see why the film was such a huge success, especially in the current DVD release with its superb new score and generally excellent picture quality.