THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY (1965)

This big adaptation of Irving Stone’s big bestseller about Michelangelo, Pope Julius II and that big Sistine Chapel was a big fiasco for all concerned. But in spite of its miserable rep, it’s actually quite the big, fat entertainment. Charlton Heston’s acting range is all clenched teeth & dirty fingernails as Michelangelo, but he’s also a ringer for Mickey’s marble Moses (as De Mille noted when casting THE TEN COMMANDMENTS/’56) and that makes up for a lot. Rex Harrison’s got the bearing & voice for a Pope, plus he’s lit like a Titian portrait (courtesy of lenser Leon Shamroy) and given a characterization that looks back to his King of Siam (courtesy of scripter Philip Dunne). (Pope Julius & Michelangelo banter on about finishing the ceiling like Anna & the King arguing over her private house.) As director Carol Reed must have been aware, the film is not without its giggle-worthy moments, windy philosophical asides and that dreamy visualization of the Sistine Chapel in the clouds, but he does get over a sense of how precarious life in Rome had become. (Anyway, Reed had recently ‘walked’ on another mega-disaster, Brando’s MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY/’62, and had to see this thru.) They even do an intelligent job finessing Michelangelo’s ambiguous sexuality. No small thing in ‘65* And, in the superb 2004 restoration, you get to see another idea of what the frescos looked like when they were new. Tonally quite different than the real thing back in ‘65 or how they currently look after the recent major cleaning. (BTW, the film is just a little over two hours since the opening reel & a half are taken up by a potted tour of Michelangelo’s career as sculptor, closely modeled on the Oscar winning documentary, THE TITAN/’50.)

READ ALL ABOUT IT: Robert Hughes’ new historical tour of ROME, a great (if rather depressing) read, covers this period nicely.

DOUBLE-BILL: The best art direction for any film set during the Italian Renaissance goes north to a recreated Florence where the Gish sisters, along with Ronald Colman & William Powell made ROMOLA/’24 for Henry King. The available DVDs were all mastered from 16mm ‘dupe’ prints that barely reveal the astonishing urban sets and needle-sharp photography which include some divine color tinting effects. (That’s literally Divine, as in the Hand of God.) Since excellent materials exist for a proper restoration, perhaps the Gish estate will award its annual prize to itself and give this film the full restoration/musical score treatment it deserves/needs. It’s one of those films that dies a slow death on screen unless it’s shown at its full length (120 min) and with the best possible visual image.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Heston used to get all huffy when the subject of Michelangelo’s sexual orientation came up in interviews. But then, he also refused to see the gay sub-text Gore Vidal had slipped into the relationship between his Ben-Hur & Stephen Boyd’s Messala.

THE ANDERSON TAPES (1971)

The secret word on this NYC caper pic is SURVEILLANCE, but Sidney Lumet & scripter Frank Pierson don’t do enough with the idea. Sean Connery, fresh out of jail, moves in with gal-pal Dyan Cannon, a pricey tart who’s landed a lux flat on the Upper East Side. He figures he can rob everyone in the whole ultra-exclusive building with a gang of his prison buds and a start-up stake from his old mob pal Alan King. The gimmick is that his every move is being video taped or heard via wire-tap on various unrelated investigations already in place. Yet, he’s protected since any response from the cops or the Feds would screw up all the on-going cases. It’s a neat angle for a caper pic; if only Lumet & Pierson followed up on it. Instead, we get a series of meet-cutes as Connery puts his gang together and scopes out the victims. Even this might work if Lumet wasn’t still wedded to his coarse tv style, punctuating his laughs with gross close-ups designed to play on a small telly screen along with some alarmingly stagy character acting. (Two years later, Lumet would finally break out of his tv mind-set with SERPICO/’73.) At least, we can enjoy all the NYC location stuff, not so common at the time, a toupee-less Connery and a smiley Christopher Walken in his dewy debut. (And cringe at a couple of stereotypical gay types.) Plus, Lumet fanciers will want to stick it out to see a preview of better things to come starting with a smash ‘reveal’ in the third act (you’ll have no trouble spotting it) which sets up a suspenseful finale using sharp parallel cuts between the on-going robbery and the on-coming cops. They even manage to get one of those surveillance cameras involved with the plot.

SKIDOO (1968)

After the issue-oriented ‘race’ drama HURRY SUNDOWN/’67 abruptly ended his winning streak, aging auteur Otto Preminger surprised everyone (including himself), producing & directing a ‘Mod,’ madcap, all-star comedy. The humorless Stanley Kramer had recently made a big success of IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD/’63, and some people still think that’s a hoot. Why not Otto? So, with a hip young writer hired on his son’s recommendation*, and the likes of Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Fred Clark, Frankie Avalon, Cesar Romero, Frank Gorshin, Peter Lawford, George Raft, Burgess Meredith, John Phillip Law, Austin Pendleton, Richard Kiel, Arnold Stang, Slim Pickens, Mickey Rooney & Groucho Marx in his old greasepaint mustache, it already sounded hilarious, right? (Cineasts will be shocked to learn that Mickey Rooney gives the pic's subtlest perf.) The two-tiered plot has retired hitman Jackie Gleason taking on one last assignment just as his curvaceous daughter takes up with a busload of free-loving hippy Peaceniks. With its Day-Glo costumes & berserk plotting, the film is so odd, such a calamitous collection of groovy attitudes & execution interruptus, that it acquires a kind of (painful) fascination. The few funny ideas get pummeled to death thru repetition and the film’s climax, a mass LSD-induced ‘trip’ on Alcatraz, could pass for one of Maurice Binder’s James Bond credit sequences. At last, the end credits come up, sung for us by Harry Nilsson. And, it’s . . . it’s . . . it’s adorable. Go figure.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *Scripter Doran William Cannon managed one more credit, another quirky comedy with free-love, ‘hippy’ overtones, Robert Altman’s BREWSTER MCCLOUD/’70. That gets much closer to the mark and may be the only pro-virginity ‘youth film’ of its era.

LUDWIG (1973)

Luchino Visconti’s LUDWIG is a hard-luck case. Cobbled together as a replacement for a canceled Proust project; the stress of production helped precipitate a heart-attack Visconti never fully recovered from; his ‘original cut’ was slashed by nearly an hour & a half; and it had to follow Visconti’s much acclaimed DEATH IN VENICE/’71. (Plus, in hindsight, find itself followed by his unjustly maligned CONVERSATION PIECE/’74, a sort of DEATH IN VENICE-Lite, that has now gained special status as a connoisseur’s piece.) Now, that we can see all 235 minutes of it, the film is much improved, and feels paradoxically shorter, but still problematic. Ludwig, King of Bavaria, was mad for castles, mad for Wagner operas, mad for pretty boys and just plain mad. Not far off from Visconti, yet the film feels staid & stale. A matter of taste? You can just about feel Visconti's disdain toward the heavy Bavarian hunting motifs that adorn the walls as he compensates by adding fussy edits to the stuffy interior scenes while lenser Armando Nannuzzi puts in hopeful, but useless little zooms. It’s only in the third act, as Ludwig starts to lose control that Visconti begins to find some. (No small matter in a film this length!) Alas, by then, we’ve lost the horrid Wagners, so entertaining played by Trevor Howard & Silvana Mangano, and are left with the Queen Mother, a Princess marked return-to-sender, an orgy’s-worth of Aryan boys with shaggy hair, and the voice of Giancarlo Giannini’s emanating from Helmut Berger’s Ludwig in the preferred Italian-language version. It’s all a bit daunting.

BALADA TRISTE DE TROMPETA / THE LAST CIRCUS (2010)

Writer/director Alex de la Iglesia is way over-the-top in this under-the-big-top tale, yet winds up singing the same old circus tune about the leading lady who can’t quit her brutish strongman lover, and the melancholy clown with the painted teardrop who pines for her in vain. In this iteration, everyone’s a clown and the gruesome disfigurements don’t come off with cold-cream, but the rise in temperature has barely changed things. Iglesia revels in the visual possibilities, taking advantage of miscues, misunderstandings & misadventures to prop up extravagant doses of gore, violence & sex, but to diminishing effect. Usually, there’s little point in bemoaning the film that didn’t get made, but BALLAD OF THE SAD TRUMPET is something of an exception to the rule since Iglesia did make that other pic . . . it’s the prologue to this film! And its something of a triumph . . . for a couple or three reels. Set three & a half decades back from the main story, in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, we open as a show is in progress. The clowns are on, the children are in hysterics, then the war marches down the street in all its insanity. The partisans forcibly recruit the circus staff (clowns, animal handlers, animals!, acrobats, the works) to beef up numbers for a suicide stand against a surge of fascist forces. We meet the son of the top clown, a chipper, bespectacled lad who bears little resemblance to the miscast lardass the film has him grow into. And while the frenetic style & Fellini-esque tone threatens to go off-balance, Iglesia is still able to make sense of things. Stunningly so. Then we leap ahead to the '70s, and find we’re working without a net . . . splat!

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: The ultimate in clown masochism & revenge remains Victor Seatrom’s/Sjöström’s magnificent Lon Chaney starrer HE WHO GETS SLAPPED/’24 - the first release from the newly combined M-G-M.

KURONEKO / BLACK CAT (1968)

Kaneto Shindô’s influential ghost story is wildly theatrical & impossibly elegant; it’s also so far gone into Eastern custom, lore & attitude that it’s tough for a Western audience to keep from cracking-wise at the screen. In feudal Japan, a mother & her son’s wife are attacked by roaming samurai and left for dead in their burning home. Soon, their spirits, apparently preserved by their black house cat, brings them back as avenging ghost ladies. Then, when the husband returns from the war as a heroic samurai warrior, he’s assigned to eliminate the deadly ghosts before they kill again. Is love stronger than immortal revenge? Is killing your already dead wife & mother double jeopardy? Is he really having erotic sex with his wife . . . did he actually ask her if he should ‘come again?’ And did Henry James subtitle this THE RETURN FROM A SCREW? Shindô, on some level, seems aware of that screwiness, he makes the samurai’s commander an oddly hirsute comic vaudevillian; and some of the martial-arts tricks now look more than a bit dated; but there are too many bewitchingly lovely compositions to allow you to totally give in to the giggles. One magnificent sun-drenched silhouette shot of the husband galloping toward us on horseback is enough to justify the entire film. How was this shot accomplished?

DOUBLE-BILL: Shindô’s ONIBABA/’64 is considered something of a companion piece to this. But what a lot of Shindô films exist; 45 as director & scripts for 159!! His final release came out in 2010, and he was 100 when he died last month (05/12).

NO MAN IS AN ISLAND (1962)

Jeffrey Hunter stars in this by-the-numbers WWII story about five navy men who run off to the hills of Guam rather than surrender when the Japanese occupy the island. One by one, they go down, until sole-survivor Hunter, with the help of some loyal locals, is able to get important info out to the U.S. fleet and himself saved. There’s a neat fact-inspired story in here (a bit like the secondary story in SOUTH PACIFIC) and the film, shot in the Philippines, often has a strikingly clear look to its photography as well as having its heart in the right place. Heck, not only does Hunter stick up for the islanders, he even pitches in at the local leper colony where he briefly takes refuge. And there’s some extra cool day-for-night panoramas across some cultivated fields during a race to the shore late in the pic. But far too much of the film is almost laughably amateurish, thanks to inept megging from producer Richard Goldstone & scripter John Monks, Jr. in their sole shot at directing. They’re really terrible, and the cornpone editing only adds to the inadvertent merriment. You’ll see why they both went back to their day jobs.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Just a couple of years later, FATHER GOOSE/’64 had Cary Grant & Leslie Caron teasing a pretty good comedy out of this situation.

ILUMINADOS POR EL FUEGO / BLESSED BY FIRE (2005)

This Argentinian pic from Tristán Bauer shows how the humiliating loss of the Falkland Islands (the Malvinas had Argentine prevailed over Britain) continues to resonant. The memories come flooding back to one vet, now a reporter, when he visits a psychologically troubled soldier-pal, now in a coma after a suicide attempt. The film then jumps back to 1982 to give witness to the ineptly conducted war, the horrible conditions & the sadistic military discipline that made a bad situation hopeless. The film has a lot going for it technically, the recreations are often harrowing, but Bauer neglects to vividly personalize his three main grunts, reducing them, and hundreds of other conscripts, to bland ‘everymen.' He does better at particularizing a few incompetent officers, but can’t maintain a lot of tension to one-sided battles that are all routs & retreat. (Oddly, the ultimate responsibility of the military leaders at home is hardly touched on.) At the close, Bauer stumbles badly, bringing a survivor back to the Malvinas for a bit of easy, unearned sentimentality in his old fox-hole. Much better is an earlier scene that shows a pick-up soccer game breaking out spontaneously after the army’s final retreat. Loosely scripted & unforced, it shows what missing from the rest of the film.

THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO (1934)

Warner Bros reset the template for swashbucklers by adding three key ingredients to their production of CAPTAIN BLOOD/’35: Michael Curtiz’s kinetic helming; the impossibly lush scores of Erich Wolfgang Korngold; and the youthful dash of a barely known Errol Flynn. But their success didn’t come out of a vacuum, and this sturdy indie production, from producer Edward Small & helmer Rowland V. Lee, was the likely budget template that helped Warners finally regain the old Doug Fairbanks’ mojo for the sound era. Because of his perf in this, Robert Donat was offered the lead in BLOOD*, and he could hardly be bettered as the wronged man who escapes from a prison dungeon to find fortune & revenge in Dumas’ oft-filmed tale. (As in most adaptations, he also finds tru-love, though the book holds to the same French romantic fatalism found in CYRANO DE BERGERAC.) And how tenderly Donat speaks the play's famous catch-phrase, 'The world is mine.' Imagine Eugene O'Neill's dad, James, bellowing the line on those endless tours that robbed him of his natural gifts; as his son's LONG DAYS JOURNEY INTO NIGHT would have it. The limited budget occasionally shows on screen here, but this is generally quite a show, with a rip-snorting pace and a second echelon cast that only occasionally let their flat Mid-Western vowels detract from a proper Continental flavor. Look for the Hen’s Tooth DVD which, though hardly pristine, represents a significant improvement (in image quality and completeness) over past editions.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Donat, who never worked in the States again, skipped BLOOD to play yet another ‘wronged man’ in Alfred Hitchcock’s THE 39 STEPS/’35. Not a bad trade-off. And he’d play modern swashbucklers in KNIGHT WITHOUT ARMOR/’37 and in THE ADVENTURES OF TARTU/’43, a little seen gem that’s a bit of a precursor to James Bond.

DOUBLE-BILL: Those who can accept the absurdly docile fellows who pass for hardened prisoners in THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION/’94 can enjoy seeing how closely it follows Dumas.