HELLGATE (1952)

Western specialist Charles Marquis Warren flattens out a good cast and a good story in this loose reworking of John Ford’s THE PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND/’36.*  That one’s about Samuel Mudd, the doctor who innocently set John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg only to find himself jailed as co-conspirator in Lincoln’s assassination.  Here, horse doc Sterling Hayden tapes up the ribcage of a South-sympathizing guerrilla and is sentenced to life at Hellgate, a sort of landlocked Devil’s Island out in the desert.   Menacing Lieutenant Ward Bond runs the place; snarling inmate James Arness runs Hayden’s cell; and a tribe of bounty-hunting Indians, along with the arid setting, make escape all but impossible.  Meanwhile, back at the farm, wifey Joan Leslie petitions Washington for justice just as a typhus epidemic hits Hellgate.  The piece is just loaded with dramatic possibilities, and, for a low-ball production from indie outfit Lippert Pictures, an impressive production outlay in man, horse & location work.   But dynamism is missing from Warren’s presentation while the compressed grey-scale b&w processing make it look like a tv anthology show.  Pity.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  *As mentioned above, PoSI, a perennially underrated title.  Ford, and Ford scholars, unhappy with leading man Warner Baxter (?) write it off as another under-realized Civil War project.   But it, and Baxter, are very good.

DJANGO (1966)

Too fat to be joined at the hip, but the two Sergios, Leone & Corbucci, were present at creation as godfathers to the Spaghetti Western. Sergio Leone heading up the A-Team and Sergio Corbucci taking the B-Team. No shame in that; Spaghetti Westerns go far down the alphabet. DJANGO, probably his first distinctive pic, is out via Blue Underground in a generally excellent transfer of the full (all violence included) 92 minute cut. It's a four-cornered fable that finds Franco Nero’s army-of-one hauling a Gatling gun around in a coffin as he alternately plays with, then against, a motley gang of Mexican revolutionary cutthroats who are fending off armies North and South of the Mexican border. The battles and fights are blunt, busy & exciting, if not especially believable. (The technical bravura & daring originality of Sergio Leone don’t enter into the Corbucci helming equation.) But the film has its own strengths in Franco Nero’s calm cruelty and in some really fabulous art direction. Particularly, in the dead town where half the film plays out in a saloon full of harpies and on the color-drained main street, a masterpiece of dramatic design. Too bad the big climax is kind of a letdown, missing the flair & suspense of an earlier set piece that finds Django & his multi-purpose coffin going rogue for a fortune in gold powder.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Corbucci churned out heaps of product, little available Stateside. But from later this year, see him put Burt Reynolds thru his paces in the violently effective NAVAJO JOE/’66. And, of course, there’s Quentin Tarantino’s largely unrelated DJANGO UNCHAINED/’12; best in its first hour.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/10/navaho-joe-1966.html

HEISEI TANUKI GASSEN PONPOKO / POM POKO (1994)

This animated folk-fantasy from Studio Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata makes an unlikely candidate for Stateside cross-over. The main storyline has packs of ‘tanuki’ (raccoon dogs) calling a truce to take on a common enemy: the rapid industrial & housing developments that are taking away their forests. Easy enough to relate to, but the shape-shifting animals are difficult to keep straight*, while the generally defeatist tone is, frankly, a bummer. The film has been translated, but not situated culturally. Even with a constant narrator as guide, the quick-changing ways of the critters come off as arbitrary rather than daringly adventurous. Worse, it tends to negate any emotional connection. Perhaps a more stylized painterly presentation, like the strolling perspective in a series of Japanese landscape vistas, or some such artistically confining principle would help focus our attention on formal design rather the waylaid character & story elements. As it stands, the film only highlights the achievements of Takahata’s Ghibli partner Hayao Miyazaki.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *A few of the macho raccoon dogs stand out thanks to their prominent testicles. Yikes! Great opportunity for a talk about neutering with the kiddies.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: Stick with BAMBI/’42.   OR: Closer yet, WATERSHIP DOWN/’78 https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/04/watership-down-1978.html

LILI (1953)

Baby-boomers are deservedly fond of this pocket-sized, sentimental musical. Really a semi-musical with just the one song (‘Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo’) and a pair of mini dream-ballets. (Note that M-G-M’s Original Soundtrack ‘lp’ -- see below -- takes up just one side of a 10" disc.*) As for sentimentality; well, it’s pretty tough-minded for kid-friendly fare featuring an attempted rape, a barely averted suicide, plus a girl’s dream of sexual awakening. And that’s just the first act! Leslie Caron is perfectly cast as an orphaned gamine who falls twice: first for Jean-Pierre Aumont’s suave circus magician; then another kind of fall, this time right into Mel Ferrer’s puppet act as a serendipitous naïf interlocutor. From there, we have only to wait for Lili to ‘see’ behind those puppets to hit a happy ending. Yet the series of small revelations experienced in a mere 80 minutes are unexpectedly devastating. There’s real surprise in the amount of emotion coming from Helen Deutsch’s beautifully structured script and Charles Walters’ no-frills helming; it could easily have been a very sticky fable. But with its fine supporting cast and undersold uplift, you’re easily won over by all the care and detail work in here. It keeps beating your expectations: that simple grey painted backdrop for the final ballet; the lack of villains; letting Caron do her own vocals (hurrah!); and truly outstanding portrait work from lenser Robert Planck. Look sharp for a magnificent shot of Caron taken from behind the puppets, framed by the blue tulle of a puppet’s dress as she sings along. Back in the silent days, a close-up like that might have made a career. Especially with Caron perfectly poised between gawky youth and the beauty revealed in GIGI/’58.

LINK: *B’way got around to making a proper musical out of LILI in Bob Merrill’s CARNIVAL. (An early stage direction credit for Gower Champion who stars on Side Two of our LILI ‘lp.’) A forgotten charmer, it was enchantingly revived by NYC’s ENCORES! in 2002 with Brian Stokes Mitchell in the Mel Ferrer role; Douglas Sills, hilarious in the Jean-Pierre Aumont part; Anne Hathaway, fresh out of Juilliard & instantly making a name for herself as Lili; and a fine foursome of puppets from the Muppets Workshop stealing every scene they were in. Especially when they pretended to be reading their lines out of prompt books. Here’s a LINK to a bit of Hathaway live on stage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNZ8uaw_dDE

THE MAN IN THE NET (1959)

The rap on director Michael Curtiz holds that the dynamic Warner Bros. workhorse (90 films over twenty-five years) lost his creative mojo when he left the studio in the mid-‘50s. What’s left out of the consideration is that Curtiz ankled just as WideScreen pics ambled in. The pageant-like staging stratagems used in THE EGYPTIAN/’54 (20th/Fox-CinemaScope) or to introduce VistaVision on Paramount’s WHITE CHRISTMAS/’54 were to some extent dictated by nervous studio execs Curtiz catered to as ‘new boy on the block.’ (After four decades of megging!) Add in the tiny selection of lenses available (especially in ‘Scope), plus the huge commercial success of CHRISTMAS (the year’s top grosser), and you can see why the normally combative Curtiz would go along with the bland style.* Not here. Working on an independent production, he comes close to his old form, revving up this whodunnit with a generous smear of childhood poetic realism and a big assist from lenser John Seitz, also in a notable return to form after B-pics & tv gigs. Alan Ladd (with a bloated face & looking past his age) is an ex-commercial artist trying to make a go as a fine arts painter. A loner, he pals with some of the local kids who come to watch him sketch, but is barely social at all, unlike his high-strung, alcoholic wife (Carolyn Jones, trying to go full Bette Davis, but coming up short). When the neurotic dear suddenly goes missing, presumed dead, circumstantial evidence points to Ladd and the nice rural town suddenly turns vicious. Ladd goes on the lam, hiding out/helped by the local kids he’s befriended. Reginald Rose’s script is too blunt to pull us in properly, but there’s just enough to give Curtiz & Co. something special to work with. And while it's no NIGHT OF THE HUNTER/’55 or WHISTLE DOWN THE WIND/’61** in the lyrical mortal fable department, it does work up a special tone worth attending to.

DOUBLE-BILL: **NIGHT or WHISTLE would pair nicely with this, but keep a look out for THE PROUD REBEL/’58, an even better Ladd/Curtiz collaboration with Olivia de Havilland & Ladd’s own kid as his deaf son. It too is beautifully shot, by another never-Oscar’d great, Ted McCord.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Rejecting that bland early CinemaScope style, one of the treats in the Judy Garland/’54 version of A STAR IS BORN, especially in its first two reels, is watching director George Cukor shred the standard, stolid, ‘Scope stylistics of the day. He almost certainly wouldn’t have gotten away with such daring at his home studio (M-G-M), but as an expensive hired-hand helmer on the Warners lot, working with his own non-house visual crew, he’s positively fearless, even experimental. (Of course, this being Hollywood, the worm turned, the production lost money, and a grinning Jack Warner chopped the negative down to size, making sure to destroy all the discards.)

GERONIMO (1962)

THE RIFLEMAN must have been on hiatus for tv star Chuck Connors to get into Apache drag as this film’s blue-eyed Geronimo. Made with that popular show’s creative team, it’s not as bad as you might expect . . . but then, what were you expecting? By ‘62, there’s not much frisson in seeing this tale of defiance told from a Native American POV; or even in having the US Army as the villain, chasing a once proud people off their land treaty or no. But it is a surprise to find the Apache principals still being played by non-Indian actors. A surprise and a disappointment; heck, Chief Thundercloud played Geronimo on screen back in 1939 and again in 1950.) Connors does his low-rent Charlton Heston thing as the noble warrior and lets his soon-to-be wife Kamala Devi deliver English elocution lessons as his takeaway bride. They’re largely unconvincing, but the soul of verisimilitude next to Ross Martin’s aide-de-campfire from 2nd Avenue. At least, the largely made up story has a big, lux feel to it; and a clever idea in giving Geronimo a wound that won’t heal. It’s positively Wagnerian, like Amfortas. It’s not only a swell metaphor for enduring Native American troubles, it also helps set up a much needed action set piece (a well-staged escape-from-town) in the middle of a drawn out siege.

DOUBLE-BILL: 1993 had two GERONIMO pics, a forgotten TNT tv film and a major miss in GERONIMO: AN AMERICAN LEGEND which did serious career damage to helmer Walter Hill, writer John Milius & Jason (Black Hole) Patric, an actor able to suck the life out of anything near him.

KOI NO TSUMI / GUILTY OF ROMANCE (2011)

Perverse, if stylishly-handled, thriller from writer/director Sion Sono is half murder case procedural; half female empowerment via prostitution; half prim housewife bursts homely boundaries. No wonder the film feels over-stuffed. Divided into five chapters, but pretty much functioning as a traditional three-act, the film opens as two mix-and-match corpses, found in the ‘Love Hotel’ district, are discovered to be the half human/half mannequin remains of one. The crime, told in flashback, plays in kinky contrast to the well-adjusted homelife of the female chief detective on the case. But Sono peels back layers on all his characters, including the detective, revealing unexpected connections & role reversals so you’re never quite sure who’s holding the reins in the mind, power or sex games. At times playfully grisly, at others winkingly suggestive (hard ‘R’ sex; ever growing sausage samples), and a strong, freaky denouement with a clever tag ending to paper over a lot of repetitive action.

DOUBLE-BILL: It’s now a bit of a hoot, but THE EYES OF LAURA MARS/’78 (script by John Carpenter) took the kinky sex thriller/murder-mystery to a new level in its day. 

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Sono errs badly plugging in Mahler’s Adagietto for a bit of unearned emotion. But after getting Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Ravel & Rachmaninoff in BIRDMAN, why complain?

BIRDMAN (2014)

As a charter-member of the Give Michael Keaton A Tom Hanks Role Now And Then Club, it was a kick to hear all the buzz coming off this high-visibility project. But as particulars leaked out from over-hyped Film Fest showings, it seemed clear that the usual pretentious befuddlements of writer/director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s would dampen any anticipation. (Subtitled OR THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUE OF IGNORANCE in case you harbored any hope.) The film’s a meta-physical whimsy with Keaton rejiggering his faded career as a flying SuperHero by going on-stage in his own Raymond Carver adaptation. Really, that’s the plot. There’s a load and a half of technical obfuscation, largely superfluous to the theme or action, using a much commented upon appearance of one unedited take.* Too clever by half, the technique has the tail wagging the dog as we chase characters from behind for too many interconnected scenes and then find we have to play them out with compromised lens choices (often fish-eye) that add unwanted psychological distortion to a story that needs to be seen plain if its going to add up to anything other than a freak show. Oh well. Many seem to get off on the excess and the actors all seem to be having a whale of a time. (Make that a ‘wail’ of a time.) Though the women are hard to keep track of. And why all the gaffes about B’way? Half-price previews? A NYTimes writer rooting against the success of an original drama on B’way? Critics sitting on-the-aisle at Opening Night? When did these people last go to the theater? 1962?

DOUBLE-BILL: Time has been unusually kind to George Cukor’s A DOUBLE LIFE/’47, with Ronald Colman going all Method-Actory on Othello in Ruth Gordon/Garson Kanin’s theatrically knowing script under Milton Krasner’s brooding lens.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Hitchcock attempted the one-shot look on ROPE/’48, hoping to build real-time suspense as the clock ticked. So did Aleksandr Sokurov in his fantasy documentary RUSSIAN ARK/’02. But with events playing out over a week or so, it’s a show-offy obstacle/distraction here. No doubt, Iñárritu’s idea of an artistic challenge.

ANGEL FACE (1952)

This Otto Preminger film noir has seen its rep rise over time, but it probably carries too many shopworn story & character elements for its own good. Preminger runs the narrative like an actor who needs to ‘indicate’ to get his points across; it works, but the labor shows. Jean Simmons is a spoiled heir, too close to her father, stifled novelist Herbert Marshall, and too distant from rich step-mom Barbara O’Neil. This already dangerous triangle gets thrown completely out of whack when Robert Mitchum’s ambulance driver shows up after an ‘accidental’ gas leak in O’Neil’s bedroom. He’s already in a relationship, but that doesn’t slow down Simmons . . . or Mitchum. In fact, all the couplings are more than a little ‘off’ here: cue big romantic piano theme from Dmitri Tiomkin and lensing from Harry Stradling that’s more darkly glamorous than stark noir. Under Preminger, the perfs & production are unusually smooth, with a couple of real jolts to the system, but he seems to lose interest in the third-act trial scenes. A pity since Leon Ames’ defense attorney might be an urban sketch for the sort of pragmatic attorney Preminger would be drawn to, with far more ambiguity, in ANATOMY OF A MURDER/’59.

DOUBLE-BILL: Just about any noir with a scary/murderous dame at its center and a juicy murder trial would pair up nicely (too nicely, it’s the film’s weakness). But instead of the usual suspects (DOUBLE INDEMNITY/’44; LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN/’45; POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE/'46), try the cheap, twisty illogic of IMPACT/’49.