HERE COME THE WAVES (1944)

This harmless military comedy was the last film Mark Sandrich (of the Astaire & Rogers films) completed before dying at 43 during prep for BLUE SKIES/’46. It ought to be a lot better than it is. Bing Crosby plays a cross between himself & Frank Sinatra (note the swooning bobby-soxers & his OTT rendition of ‘That Old Black Magic’) who wants to join the Navy with his big pal Sonny Tufts. Trouble comes by way of twin sisters, a nutty blonde played by Betty Hutton & a sobersided brunette played by . . . Betty Hutton. (The split-screen stuff is nifty, with a couple of tricky crossovers thrown in.) They all wind up putting on a big recruitment show for the WAVES with songs from Harold Arlen & Johnny Mercer. ‘Ac-cen-tu-ate the Positive’ came out of this one, but they rarely show the clip (even in anthologies) because it’s in blackface! Oy! (Maybe this ain’t so harmless.) Well, at least Bing sounds great (dig those low notes on ‘Accentuate’) and Hutton gets her laughs, come hell or high water. She’s really quite charming as the quiet sis, a lot like Rosemary Clooney in WHITE CHRISTMAS/’54 which stole a good bit from this one.

GASLIGHT (1944)

George Cukor’s reputation as an actor’s director of tasteful literary adaptions downplays the strong visual flair he kept in reserve. In this grand psychological thriller, the one about the young wife whose husband is trying to drive her mad (‘gaslight’ her), the main set is a posh London row house with a narrow design that forces many scenes to move from floor to floor. Cukor brings fluid staging, unusual camera angles, elaborate tracking shots & long takes to the challenge. Perhaps they aren’t noticed because they always serve the story rather then call attention to themself. Joseph Ruttenberg’s lensing is masterfully lit (and shadowed), and Cukor even manages some believable street atmosphere, avoiding the flat, studio-bound Londontown look typical at M-G-M. (The Italian-set prologue shows the usual lack of care.) Ingrid Bergman actually deserved her Oscar as the blushing bride who naturally grows only more gorgeous as hysteria & illness overtake her. (Getting more beautiful as she got sicker & sicker was a Bergman specialty. See THE BELLS OF ST. MARY'S/45, NOTORIOUS/’46 and ARCH OF TRIUMPH/’48.) As the obsessed, sadistic husband, Charles Boyer seems a bit OTT, but he’s got an acting strategy as well. When your audience is already ahead of the plot, why try to hide your character arc? It’s a clever move, and it works. Poor Joseph Cotton has no such option; his nice-guy role sucks. But 17 yr-old Angela Lansbury is hilariously assured as the cheeky parlour maid. What a knock-out debut. M-G-M’s suppression of the earlier British version (ANGEL STREET/’40) has made that film a Cinderella pick for many critics. But that’s no reason to denigrate Hollywood’s deluxe version.

CONTEST: Oddly, the most famous/suspenseful moment in the original play doesn’t appear in either film version. It involved a certain article of clothing. Name the item and who it belongs to to win our usual prize, a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up of your choice.

MUERTE DE UN CICLISTA / DEATH OF A CYCLIST (1955)

Juan Antonio Bardem, one of the early lights of modern Spanish cinema (and uncle to actor Javier), won a Cannes Jury prize with this film. On its surface, this is a melodrama about an adulterous couple who run over a cyclist as they drive back from a tryst. The unsolved death shows up in the next day’s papers, but the chances of these two getting caught looks slim. The dead cyclist was a poor cog, a common laborer from the tenements like so many others. The adulterers come from wealthy families, are well connected and intimate with the corrupt society that writes the rules & protects its own. Only their own sense of guilt could upset things, if they had any guilt. Or a threat of blackmail from a society gadfly. What could he have seen? Could the dead man’s widow know anything? Why are the police asking questions? Just how much trouble are they in? Bardem mixes this burgoo of Italian NeoRealism and traditional tropes out of classic adulterous Hollywood fare like NOTORIOUS and THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (both 1946) to reasonable effect, but the film falls uncomfortably between stylistic stools and Bardem gets off on the wrong foot by not letting us know who was at fault for the accident. Over @ Universal in Hollywood, the great Douglas Sirk was doing just this sort of thing (and with a swing to it) . . . he never got a Cannes Jury Prize.

KISS OF DEATH (1947)

Hollywood put out heaps of filmes noir in the post-war years, but 20th/Fox was the studio that pushed them off the back-lots & onto the (back)streets of America, usually with Elia Kazan, Jules Dassin or Henry Hathaway helming. The format proved so popular, these pioneering crime dramas can now look a bit old-hat. But not this one. While newbie helmers Kazan & Dassin used the genre as a vehicle to go on location, Hathaway treated real locations as if they were studio sets, sturdy scaffolding for his signature set pieces of violence & suspense. He helmed this one in & around NYC (except for the finale*) and it’s mostly remembered for Richard Widmark’s wild debut as a psychopathic killer. (The old lady, the wheelchair, the staircase, the giggle; it’s that one.) But the whole film holds up nicely with a tight script from the great Ben Hecht and superb lensing from longtime ace Herbert Nordine who’d been at it since the ‘teens. Look sharp for a scene where Widmark’s malevolence all but glows thru a curtain slit. Victor Mature is perfectly cast as a hulking, yet oddly delicate, jewel thief who winds up working as an informer for Brian Donlevy’s Asst. D.A. Naturally, the film has atmosphere to spare, and not just from the city. The violence & suspense still hold a nasty kick.

*Some stock footage was a bit out of date, too. A movie marque shows Jeanette MacDonald in THE LOVE PARADE from 1929!

KORUTO WA ORE NO PASUPOTO / A COLT IS MY PASSPORT (1967)

This sharp little crime film from Japan’s Nikkatsu Studios was made for the local market, but it’s getting a welcome Stateside release as part of Criterion’s mid-‘60s Japanese noirs series. Anyone who’s enjoyed the laconic French gangsters of Jean-Pierre Melville or Sergio Leone’s ‘Spaghetti Western’ anti-heroes will know the terrain. Tough-guy Joe Shishido (of the chipmunk cheeks & Bobby Darin swagger) is the seasoned professional hitman who never misses. But once he ‘removes’ the rival's boss, the gang that hired him is now free to join up with their former enemies. Suddenly, Shishido is the one guy they all want out of the picture, permanently. The hitman is now the target. But you misread Shishido’s stoicism for fatalism at your peril. Helmer Takashi Monura does a beautiful job organizing his scenes & compositions, the film runs like a dream, but he doesn’t quite have the spatial orientation chops to pull off what should be a jaw-dropping finale. Even so, except for the fake Ennio Morricone score from Harumi Ibe, it’s a handsome & satisfying piece of work.

EUROPA (aka ZENTROPA) (1991)

Scripter/helmer/provocateur Lars von Trier was still fully engaged on all artistic levels in this wildly inventive, thru-a-glass-darkly, post-WWII fable. Technically, the film is ravishing as Trier employs a surging mix of rich color & high contrast b&w (often within the same frame) in combination with a fluid soundstage æsthetic he’s meticulously worked out on storyboards worthy of a graphic novel. The rustle of an unexpected breeze won’t be found here, but there can be art in artifice. The story plays out like a deconstructed ‘take’ on THE THIRD MAN/’49. A ‘good’ American blunders his way into a demoralized, wicked post-war world he’s unable to fathom and falls for the mysterious beauty who turns out to be less Venus than Venus Flytrap. His good intentions unwittingly aid diehard enemy stragglers, and not even the blunt advise of a sympathetic officer can bring this naïf up to speed. Trier’s Europe is no divided Vienna, but a train that's both solid & surrealistic, with discrete carriages holding the past, present & future of Europe. It’s a thrilling ride and a daringly vivid act of imagination that makes Steven Soderbergh’s THIRD MAN pastiche (THE GOOD GERMAN/’06) look hopelessly square.

SHORTBUS (2006)

John Cameron Mitchell followed up his transsexual punk-rock saga, HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH/’01, with this sexually frank tall tail tale. He jump-starts his four inter-connected stories with explicit sex scenes (real, not simulated sex) that are direct, erotic & wildly funny. It’s a great opening with sexual persuasions that cover all the bases; straight to gay, solo to S&M-lite. Filmed without blinkers or bias, Mitchell gets just about everything right that pornography gets wrong. Makes you smile, makes you horny, makes you hot & happy. And then the plots kick in. Well, you can’t have everything. Mitchell & his actors used improv, workshops, deep-dish interviews, and wound up with a cartload of clichés: The sex therapist who’s never had an orgasm; the studly gay who’s open to everything but love; the sad dominatrix who just wants a happy home & family life; the voyeur who learns to jump in the pool . . . literally. Oy. Gay-phobic types should be aware that Mitchell shows his own sexual bias in the scheme of things, but who cares when Paul Dawson is around as James. You gotta go back to the ‘70s when Joe Dallesandro walked around the Warhol factory without a stitch to find the like in easeful male sexuality. Why isn’t this guy making movies? And Mitchell pulls off a grand, corny climax (yes, it’s that kind of climax) using a built-to-scale NYC clay cityscape. It makes up for a lot of missteps.

LA MASCHERA DEL DEMONIO / THE MASK OF SATAN (aka BLACK SUNDAY) (1960)

Most of the Mario Bava pics that got distributed in the States were advertised to look like low-budget horror/occult fare out of the Roger Corman shop. But Corman never had the directing chops of this Italian cult fave & any surface similarity fades once you get past the trailers, advertisements & Americanized titles.* Later Bava films made extravagant use of over-ripe color schemes, but this early b&w work is equally effective. It’s a creepy tale of witchcraft, delayed revenge and the redemptive force of love . . . when abetted by a handy crucifix. The opening scene, set a couple of centuries before the main story (adapted from Gogol), is a masterly piece of Grand Guignol as two witches are tortured and held to the stake when a sudden rainstorm douses the consuming flames. The rest of the film falls considerably off this eye-popping start, but in spite of miserable dubbing, a romantic music theme that sounds borrowed from a piano bar in Rome, and the usual absurdities & illogical character motivations needed to get us thru the plot mechanics, the film is legitimately creepy & disturbing. The Anchor Bay DVD edition uses Bava’s preferred international edit restoring score & gore removed by distributor A.I.P. back in 1960.**

*And leading actress, Barbara Steele. **The Italian distributor was JOLLY FILMS!!

VAMPYR (1932)

Between his unmatched films on witches sacred & profane (LA PASSION DE JOAN D’ARC/’28 and VREDENS DAG / DAY OF WRATH/’43, Danish filmmaker Carl Dreyer made this vampire pic. An odd choice for the severe master, but VAMPYR is not your typical horror film. A dream journey, a chase after reality, a film where plot is as porous as shadows on a mist. It cannot really be explained, only experienced. For decades, film-goers had to put up with dupe prints that turned the intentionally misty look of Rudolph Maté’s exquisite sfumato photography into mud. (And with a badly cropped picture.) But the current Criterion DVD (or in Europe - Masters of Cinema) is a great improvement. VAMPYR can now be properly seen, if not fully understood. There are unforgettable moments - a dance of phantom couples spinning down a white corridor, a doppelgänger in a coffin, suffocation by flour: nightmare images as soft & inevitable as the fall of loosed feathers. You’ll discover your own indelible mysteries & horrors. "Shadow-Play’ is an old, poetic term for cinema; never was it so justified.