ONE MILLION B.C. (1940)

Best known for comedy shorts, Hal Roach’s feature-length Pre-Historic adventure is junk science & historical nonsense, but not the campy relic you expect.  Deservedly popular on release, it’s well-packaged entertainment with impressive special effects for the period.  Still fun, especially when seen in the fine UCLA Archive print that usually shows up.  (Give it a slight brightness bump for best results.)  Told in flashback as some lost hikers stumble upon a cave with drawings of past events, Victor Mature, in his first lead, is the beefy caveman who can’t fit in with either tribe in the valley.  Bulky enough to grab what he wants, he’s a meathead needing a woman’s touch to socialize him.  Enter Carole Landis.  Soon, he’s saving babies from magnified lizards passing as dinos, sharing root vegetables for a community stew, outrunning molten flows of lava, and merging tribes for mutual protection against savage beasts before heading off in silhouette to start a new family as the sun sets with Landis & saved child by his side.  D.W. Griffith had his last legit film job working Pre-Production on this.  Contrary to what’s been written not as director though he did find & film test Landis to play the civilizing mate.  Roach megged all the story material and Hal Roach Jr. did all the action & special effects.  Exceptional F/X for 1940, with perfectly matched film grain on the extensive process & optical camera tricks making all the difference.  Plus, clever use of simple painted backdrop cycloramas & matte work that enchant even when they don't completely convince.  Occasionally they’ll give a good shake to whatever’s at hand when an earthquake or volcanic eruption goes off.  Silly and endearing.  A famous 1966 remake, with Raquel Welch in fur and Ray Harryhaussen stop-motion dinos (not seen here) also has its champions.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Instead of the 1966 remake, here’s about half of Griffith’s MAN’S GENESIS.  (No musical accompaniment so blast out something suitably rude.)  Not only did this inspire Roach, but apparently Stanley Kubrick as well, who took the invention of the first weapon, and it’s potential as a useful tool of destruction against fellow man, straight from here.  (Note this was a very long one-reeler as cameraman Billy Bitzer cranked away at barely over 15fps to get more like 15 than 10 minutes out of a reel of finished film.  Slowest cranker in the biz.)   https://archive.org/details/silent-mans-genesis

SCANNERS (1981)

David Cronenberg's breakthru pic was designed to blow your mind right from the start . . . literally.  Though soon moved to the second reel, early preview showings opened with a trained  ‘Scanner’ publically demonstrating the Mind Reading/Mind Controlling technique by going mano-a-mano against a random audience member who’s actually a secretly planted ‘Master Scanner.’  It doesn’t go well; or perhaps it goes too well.  In any event, the exploding head grabbed attention in the burgeoning indie cult horror film market and Cronenberg’s rep was made.  Even sequels!  None of which he had anything to do with.  Turns out, the idea that Cronenberg was an exploitative sensationist confused content with topic.  But just what was he getting at?  Stephen Lack, a sometime actor with a wonderfully photogenic off-center face, plays a naturally gifted ‘scanner,’ kidnapped by expert Patrick McGoohan for his studies of these exceptional specimen.  Someone’s trying to kill them all off.  Someone else is trying to organize them to take over!  Take over what, exactly?  For what, exactly?  Not a film you’ll want to parse for narrative sense or consequentiality, but to simply follow along for the ride.  Gory, amusing, suspenseful, surprisingly well acted and (alas) at this stage and with this budget, very unevenly directed.  Even the cinematography a grab-bag of effective morbid atmosphere, flat underdressed sets and overlighting.  Still, nothing quite like it had been seen, and Cronenberg’s later, better considered films that followed unimaginable without it.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: For a jump in Cronenberg filmic evolution that retains his more subversive tendencies, try the underseen sicko thrills of CRASH/’96.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/01/crash-1996.html 

LADY, LET'S DANCE (1944)

In 1943, with 20th/Fox pulling the plug on ice-skating phenom Sonja Henie, Poverty Row outfit Monogram Pictures quickly moved in, making SILVER SKATES with ‘Belita’ (née Maria Belita Jepson-Turner), a British-born polyglot fluent in ballroom dance, ballet & ice skating to fill the gap.*  Presumably doing well enough for this second helping, after which no more full blown musicals, though fast-fading Belita did make a few more films in her on-and-off career.  An earnest attempt on the cheap at this hardest of all genres, this tuner is more 20th/Fox celebrity showcase than M-G-M integrated musical narrative.  Our storyline: Belita loses touch with hard-nosed agent/manager/discoverer James Ellison who enlists as she climbs toward stardom.  A move that effectively drops everything but musical turns for acts two & three, leaving nothing but a series of showcase ‘Numbos’ for our fair-weather/fair-haired star to dance & skate her way to B’way stardom.  And if most of her routines come off as pretty routine in content & presentation, we do get a couple of chances to see comic skating legends Frick & Frack and, finally, a legit ‘11 o’clock Number’ for our star.  (It’s the title track with Belita consecutively and concurrently wooed by tuxedoed corps of dancers & skaters.)  Then, post-lovers’ reunion, a kitsch patriotic solo for Belita, skating her way thru a truncated arrangement of Beethoven’s Fifth, the one that opens with that ‘V for Victory’ musical tattoo.  We laugh at it now; heck, they laughed at it then.  Hence, no more Belita Musicals.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Belita followed with THE HUNTED/’48, a film noir with a professional ice skating background to set up her specialty number.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-hunted-1948.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Belita a somewhat full-figured beauty for ballet, but, man!, could she skate!

KOKORO / THE HEART (1955)

A year before his international breakout on THE BURMESE HARP/’56, a large-scale anti-war fable, Kon Ichikawa made this far more intimate piece, too inscrutably Japan-centric for travel but superb filmmaking in its own way.  It’s 1912, and while the country is on edge as death approaches Emperor Meiji, what concerns us is a half-seen crisis between Nobuchi and his wife, the two haunted by miscommunication & tragic past events.  She’s convinced he’s seeing a mistress; he’s possibly suicidal over something he won’t discuss.  And that’s when he meets university student Hioki, the young man who jumps into the sea when he thinks Nobuchi has gone out too far.  Perhaps.  Soon, the two establish a warm relationship, sensei to pupil, Nobuchi something of a surrogate second father to Hioki whose actual father is dying on the same schedule as the Emperor.  Alongside Hioki, we witness the oddly formal relationship between Nobuchi & his wife (oddly formal even for Japanese culture; does she even have a name in the film?), subtly emphasized by Ichikawa thru the use of Britishisms (black tea with milk; knives & forks at lunch).  Returning from a trip to see his ill father (and to show off his diploma), he finds Nobuchi suddenly opening up about his past when he was living with fellow student Kaji at the home of his future wife and her widowed mother. Something of rivalry came between them, a certain amount of flirtation that led to Nobuchi suddenly proposing marriage and prompting a falling out between the men and four deaths before we reach the end.  Ichikawa, rigorous and riveting, gives just enough motivation to show how this happens.  Pulling back the curtains without losing the mystery.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  As mentioned, THE BURMESE HARP which you’d never expect came from the same filmmaker.  A range typical of Ichikawa.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/07/biruma-no-tategoto-burmese-harp-1956.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: In addition to an immaculate filming technique, Ichikawa shows himself a master of the Japanese custom for using boxy rooms & sliding screen doors in homes as alternate framing & editing devices.  Hollywood directors, working in Japan, occasionally figure out such framing strategies, but never seem to catch on to their functionality as quasi edits.

THE GUILT OF JANET AMES (1947)

Well-intentioned WWII survivors’ guilt story has too much going for it to simply write-off, but you can’t grade on effort . . . even in Hollywood.  Rosalind Russell is the suicidal war widow desperate to find the five men her husband died to save.  If just one of them were worth the sacrifice, maybe she could get on with her life.  But when she’s knocked out after drifting into traffic, the cops find that list of survivors is the only identification on her.  Fortunately, just about everybody in town knows the last guy on the list, newsman Melvyn Douglas, once a first-rate reporter, now an unemployed habitual drinker.  Brought in to help identify Russell, he slowly gets her to unburden herself and they pal up by looking for the men on the list.  Turns out, these two broken souls have their own guilty secrets to work thru.  As post WWII problem pics go, this is a rather lovely and rather original idea.  The script may be too on-the-nose (lots to cover in 83"), but the real problem is studio hack Henry Levin’s stiff, unimaginative directing.  Drably functional at best, even in the more fantastic anti-realistic  segments, he weighs everything down.  Well, maybe not young Sid Caesar as a club comic, the most buoyant of survivors.  Mercifully, Roz catches on to who Douglas is before he has to go thru a big confession, but the film needs someone with faith & fancy to take off; a Frank Borzage or possibly Leo McCarey.  What does take off is Douglas.  In his first role after WWII service, he’s the least obvious tippler in Hollywood history.  So in touch with this character, merely hanging his head at the bar tells you all you need to know.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Everyone in the film keeps referencing PETER IBBETSON, a now forgotten piece of romantic fatalism where two lovers separated in life, stay together by ‘dreaming true.’  Icky stuff that works if the spirit is willing, as it did on stage and didn’t quite on film.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/03/peter-ibbetson-1935.html

THE MERCENARY / IL MERCENARIO (1968)

In ‘60s Spaghetti Westerns, no matter how good you were, if you weren’t Sergio Leone, you were always a bridesmaid never a bride.  So it was for Sergio Corbucci, here on a Janus-faced Alberto Grimaldi production originally put up for Gillo Pontecorvo to make after THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS.  But he ankled for Marlon Brando & BURN!/’69, another Grimaldi pic touching on similar themes, and MERCENARY got cast changes, a lighter tone, Mexican locations, a braggadocio rewrite for leading man Franco Nero, and Sergio Corbucci to direct.  Behind-the-scenes scuffles needn’t matter to the final product, but here, it’s obvious Corbucci bit off more than he could chew.  Worse, you can see this all done right by, of all people, Sergio Leone in his underappreciated DUCK YOU SUCKER!/’72.  Here, Franco Nero is a Polish mercenary in Mexico, figuring out how to turn bandito Tony Musante into a revolutionary winner.  Outnumbered, but always outwitting the Federales, everything’s fine as long as Nero gets his cut and Musante holds to strategy.  But when his myth starts to catch up to him, and a girl enters the picture, their luck starts running out.  Actually, that's where the film begins, with Musante hiding as a bullring clown North of the Border and Nero hoping to collect what he’s still owed by turning him in.  As told in flashback, will these two frenemies survive their rivalry?  Will they ride again?  Or be caught and executed side-by-side.  Under Corbucci we only care intermittently.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Seeking revenge for most of the pic, that’s Jack Palance showing off a firm middle-age ass and wearing the same scary youthful makeup Henry Fonda used in the flashback scenes of ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST out the same year.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, DUCK YOU SUCKER!, a title no one was able to convince Leone not to use.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/09/duck-you-sucker-1972.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Ennio Morricone shares credit for the music score with Bruno Nicolai, so don’t pin your hopes too high.

REMORQUES (1941)

Standing just outside the charmed circle of classic French directors, Jean Grémillon shows his best form in this atmospheric work, now looking stronger than LUMIÈRE D'ÉTÉ/’43, his more acclaimed followup.*  In production on-and-off from 1939 to‘41, just as the German Occupation was taking shape, its poetic fatalism typical of the period.  With Jean Gabin (his last film in France before leaving for ‘the duration’) as a rescue/salvage tugboat captain who leaves a crewman’s wedding early when a distressed ship sends out an S.O.S. during a storm at sea.  Stiffed by its saved, but ungrateful captain, Gabin finds he’s even more upended by Michèle Morgan, the man’s unhappy wife.  No homewrecker, but ready to leave her husband if not entirely prepared to deal with her strong feelings for Gabin.  He’s shocked to find himself in the same emotional boat.  A curious feeling for a man who’s never stopped loving his wife (Madeleine Renaud).  Neither a man of  casual affairs nor a womanizer, Gabin is spiritually at sea and blithely unaware his wife’s health has turned precarious.  Jacques Prévert’s script sees cause & depth in all of them while finding individual characterizations & motivation for a dozen shipmates, land-based friends and various professionals.  Armand Thirard (go-to cinematographer for Duvivier, Clouzot, many more) is both precise & fluid for Grémillon.  Though he (or someone) can’t do much about the unconvincing model ships-in-a-storm F/X.  A quiet melancholy ending feels just right, but the lack of resolution may still be keeping this fine work somewhat in the shade. 

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Here’s our minority view on LUMIÈRE D'ÉTÉ.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/09/lumiere-dete-1943.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The title, often given as STORMY WATERS, translates literally as towline or to haul.

THE HILL (1965)

With all those battle-hardened vets to tap into, the ‘50s & ‘60s were, in quantity if not in quality, a Golden Age for WWII themed Prisoner-of-War pics.  This one, a particularly brutal example of the form, comes with a twist since both prisoners & guards are Brits.  It flips a lot of P.O.W. tropes toward traditional prison melodrama* since no one’s planning an escape; no Geneva Convention Rules to flout; no Red Cross packages withheld at Christmas.  If only director Sidney Lumet, working hard to move past his tv-trained limitations thru attention-calling stylistics (jump cuts, distorting lenses, showy angles) realized what a load of genre clichés he’s been given: laissez-faire prison chief; sadistic top-sergeant pushing  his charges to the breaking point; a loyal second secretly plotting to takeover; pathetic, ineffectual ‘Doc’; that decent fellow running the abutting prison block.  Convicts similarly standard issue: unbreakable hero; faithful Black cell-mate; self-denying married sissy-boy; fat squealer; the tough guy who folds.  Everything but a jute mill.  In its place, a Myth of Sisyphus punishment built by the prisoners/for the prisoners, a hill of sand to run up & down with full packs on until you drop.  Nothing inherently wrong with this, but Lumet plays as if he’d just discovered the nihilistic existential deep-dish inanity-of-war.  Powerhouse acting from Sean Connery, Harry Andrews, Ian Bannen, Michael Redgrave, Ossie Davis, just too much of it.  And where’s the implied firing squad tag-ending.  Shot & removed?

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Classic prison drama BRUTE FORCE/’47 has Burt Lancaster in the Sean Connery spot and clearly shows where this comes from. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/brute-force-1947.html   OR: One of the best, unfairly forgotten WWII P.O.W. pics out the same year, KING RAT/’65 with Bryan Forbes directing George Segal, Tom Courtenay, James Fox & Denholm Elliot.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  R.S. Allen, who wrote the (unproduced?) play this was taken from, spent the year writing episodes for WWII themed P.O.W. sit-com HOGAN’S HEROES.  Yikes!

LE QUATRO VOLTE (2010)

There are a lot of goats in Michelangelo Frammartino’s Cycle of Life artfilm.  Shot Neo-Realist style in the hills of Calabria, small & incremental in story if not in theme, its first four reels (the film shot on actual 35mm*) carefully carry us thru the final days of an elderly goatherd as he tends his contented flock and troublesome cough.  The latter, unsuccessfully ‘treated’ with useless doses of ‘Sacred’ church dust.  His end a visual astonishment as goats come to call in his small room in the ancient town he lived in.  Immediately followed with a startlingly abrupt cut to the birth ejection of a beautiful white ‘kid.’  Small incidents continue in the second half of this short film, ending with a strongly etched sequence where a felled tree is broken down, cut up, stacked in a dome shape that becomes a purpose-built kiln where it is all transformed into charcoal.  A sequence that, in its far more modest manner,  need not be embarrassed to stand beside Andrei Tarkovsky’s casting of the church bell in ANDREI RUBLEV/’66.   Largely made in long patient takes, sometimes static/sometimes not, shot after shot has a rigorous compositional beauty (the goatherd’s kitchen a particular knockout), yet the frame-worthy look doesn’t stop forward momentum as it often does in these film-fest oriented projects.  A new Frammartino film, THE HOLE/’21, is about spelunking ancient historic cave sites.  Go figure.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *While advantages of 35mm over digital capture continue to shrink, fine disparities in Grey-Scale show the difference as much as anything.  A subtlety of graduation easily spotted in still shots of stacked charcoal logs seen here.  You’ll want to order prints for framing.