A Long Wound

How much can you do with a few bullet wounds? From the very beginning of 1948's Cry of the City, a gangster named Martin Rome has already been shot a few times but it's only the beginning of his path filled with crooked lawyers, self righteous lawmen, a hard boiled masseuse, and Shelley Winters (briefly). In some ways it recalls the gangster films of the 1930s but it has a very noir-ish sense of inevitable doom. It's beautifully shot with good performances.

Victor Mature as police Lieutenant Candella gets top billing but the star of the movie is Richard Conte as Martin Rome. He plays it cool as Candella tries to get information out of him, taunting the officer while recovering from a gunfight in which he shot and killed a police officer. Martin doesn't seem that worried, even though he's not likely to get off easily as a cop killer, until Niles (Ben Kroeger), a lawyer, shows up and tries to coerce Martin into taking the rap for a robbery committed by another client of his. As the lawyer tells Martin, he's going to die anyway so he might as well help another fellow in the organisation.

The only problem is that the robbery was committed with a female accomplice which, if Martin accepted the frame, would implicate his sweet, innocent young girlfriend Teena (Debra Paget).

When Martin refuses to play along, Niles tells him he's going to frame him anyway, so Martin finds himself needing to escape the hospital so he can find the real female accomplice before the police find Teena. And every minute Martin's wounds seem to get worse.

There's plenty to please the censors in the movie about how one shouldn't turn to a life of crime even if it's an integral part of the culture in the neighbourhood one grew up in. Martin and Candella are both Italian and both grew up in a neighbourhood where young men aspired to be in the mob. Martin's parents seem as though they were born in Italy and they and Martin's brother and father's friends are subtly established as a credible community. Another thing helping the film's sense of reality are several location shots in New York City, including some footage of the now gone el train.

Shelley Winters appears in just two consecutive scenes as a friend of Martin's who investigates the identity of the female robber for him. Her scenes are brief and strange, almost like they belong in a different movie. She shows up inexplicably two thirds through the film and disappears without being seen or mentioned again.

Like any good noir, as broad as the lip service for infallibility of law and order is put forth, the heart of the film subverts it the more. Martin begins with bad cards and he's dealt worse ones. He always has choices, of course, but they're never easy and they always come with a big price.

If You Put It On

It turns out the movie that marked the beginning of widescreen for Hollywood, the first CinemaScope film which literally changed the shape of the average movie forever, is a mess. 1953's The Robe, a biblical tangent epic about the Roman tribune who crucified Jesus, veers wildly from one tone to the next and all but obliterates character development with broad, rigid plot paths.

Of the film's three overqualified leads, perhaps the most overqualified is Richard Burton as that Roman tribune, Marcellus Gallio, who begins the film as a practical and devoted officer of Rome, starts to lose his mind after winning Jesus' robe gambling for it next to the cross, and then joins the ranks of some of the most obnoxious, self-righteous Christians in cinema's long history of obnoxious, self-righteous Christians.

Here a young woman blissfully explains to Marcellus how great it is Jesus didn't heal her legs so she could walk again. The man who crucified the messiah is maddened and then humbled by the forgiveness and generosity of the Christians in the little town who form no worldly attachments to things like donkeys and their own lives. Then Marcellus wins their trust by defeating another Roman officer in a protracted and exciting duel to show off how well such things come off in widescreen.

Marcellus' slave, Demetrius (Victor Mature), converts to Christianity before his master and so becomes Marcellus' guide into this new world. This movie about the repentance and soul searching of the man who killed Christ then features a long scene of Marcellus rescuing Demetrius from a prison in Rome that feels as though the studio told director Henry Koster, "Just recreate the 1938 Robin Hood in widescreen." So we have Burton duelling soldiers up a staircase as Alfred Newman's score unabashedly mimics Eric Wolfgang Korngold's score from the Errol Flynn movie.

A snarling two dimensional villain in a portrayal of Caligula (Jay Robinson), played so broadly that he makes Shredder from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles look like Macbeth, all but says, "Curses!" when he learns of Demetrius' rescue. He puts Marcellus on trial and standing with Marcellus as his wife, Diana, rivalling Burton's over-qualification, is Jean Simmons. Standing next to each other and smiling in their newfound faith in God, one can almost sense Simmons whispering through her teeth to him, "We just . . . have . . . to put up with this . . . a little longer."

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Who Will Fight the Robots?

Emilia Clarke, Daenerys Targaryen on Game of Thrones, has been cast as Sarah Connor in the upcoming Terminator movie. She follows her Game of Thrones costar Lena Headey who played Sarah Connor on the too short lived television series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. This morning I found myself imagining the Game of Thrones characters being cast instead of the actors and imagined what it would be like if Daenerys went to Cersei for advice.

CERSEI: I remember being Sarah Connor. I was nine. Or maybe thirty, I don't know. Anyway, that's why I drink wine.

DAENERYS: . . .

CERSEI: Well, you're very pretty aren't you. And so bright eyed and eager, I'm sure you'll be just terrific.

DAENERYS: I will fight to protect my son. I will do what ever it takes to ensure the survival of my son and the human race if it means destroying every last machine.

Cersei applauds and drinks more wine.

CERSEI: That's lovely. That's great. Perhaps you'll even remember that when you watch your son's skull cracking under the foot of some spindly metal skeleton man. Cersei wistfully looks up at the ceiling as she swirls wine in her goblet.

DAENERYS: Sneering If that's your attitude it's no wonder your show fell. I can see now that I will provide what you lacked, I will bring success to the Terminator franchise by refusing to bend, by holding true to my course however much bloodshed may lie in my path! You--you can stay here with your bitterness and your wine!

CERSEI: Smiling down at her cup Yes, I think I'll stay here. And I will still be here when you're on Dancing with the Stars, Darling.

. . .

Maybe I'll wait for Maisie Williams to be cast in the role. Not that I particularly dislike Emilia Clarke but I really like Lena Headey. I hope Cersei has a bigger, more complicated part to play next season.

Speaking of living with artificial humans, I watched the first episode of Real Humans last night, a Swedish Science Fiction series that began airing in 2012. io9 called it, "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo with robots," which is true in much the way Let the Right One In is Girl With the Dragon Tattoo with vampires and Seventh Seal is Girl With the Dragon Tattoo with chess. Which is to say, it's Swedish, and that's about all these works have in common. It's far more appropriate to compare it to I, Robot or, as many have, to Blade Runner. It's not a bad show though the first episode is full of obtrusive flaws.

It's about an alternate reality where androids are a part of daily life as personal servants and factory workers. The title, Real Humans, refers to a reactionary group of humans who resent the encroachment of artificial lifeforms into society. The show follows a family who purchase a "hubot", as they're called, for the first time, a man who's jealous of his wife's attachment to a hubot, and a group of hubots who have rebelled and are on the run.

There are problems. There's a scene where a man bargains for a black market hubot followed by a scene where he gives away that same hubot for free. A few character motives don't add up.

I generally consider it a mistake for a work in this genre to waste too much time on whether the AI is sentient--when you're dealing with fiction anyway, the revelation is kind of meaningless. One of the reasons Blade Runner is so good is that it takes the intelligence of Replicants as fact from the beginning, allowing the movie to examine the concept of people created by people and the impact of being such a being in such a society.

So far the most interesting aspect of Real Humans is in how the humans integrate hubots into their lives. A subplot about a family arguing over the need to get a hubot to take care of grandfather had some interesting resonance and it makes it easy to see how a servant class fits neatly into normal life.

Nesuko's Useful Kukri

I'd forgotten how needlessly difficult it is to make a pdf file, the new Boschen and Nesuko issue would have been up hours ago otherwise. Anyway, it's online now here. This is the cover:

Here's what the whole drawing looked like before I crammed it into the cover:

I drew, inked, and coloured that in less than two hours to-day, apparently too fast to think of fitting it into the right shape. Oh, well.

I ended up colouring all of the last five pages of the new issue yesterday which took a lot longer than I thought it would. It felt kind of good giving a whole day over to my comic, though. The only thing I stopped for was to watch the finale of Game of Thrones which I absolutely loved. I don't think it's a spoiler if I say the fight scene was my absolutely favourite kind of fight scene, one where you don't want either party to lose but know one of them will have to.

Spoilers after the screenshot.

There were only two things I thought were stupid in the episode--The slave asking if he could sell himself back to his old master was one thing. I mean, if you want to go live with him, go live with him, or is there a law against room mates?

I can't remember now what the other stupid thing was which I'll consider a blessing. Maybe it had to do with Shae--I found out the really dumb scene from earlier in the season, where Tyrion basically treats her like a dog he can't afford to feed anymore, wasn't in the book, which makes a lot of sense. But that badly written scene kind of took some of the punch out of the scene where Tyrion finds her in the finale.

I loved how this was maybe the most Dungeons and Dragons feeling episode yet, not only because it featured dungeons, dragons, and even dragons in a dungeon, but also the skeleton warriors. I know, it's really Ray Harryhausen, but if the show were following the modern template for skeleton warriors in fantasy, they'd be the glowing Listerine green of the ghosts in Peter Jackson's Return of the King. It's so nice to see walking, rotting skeletons again. And fireballs cast at them--or maybe they were magic missiles, I don't know, but it was a damned D&D moment.

Again, more than anything I loved the fight and the scene of Arya contemplating the dying Hound. I love how there's maybe one rational reason to like him and fifty to hate him but I bet not one person watching wanted him to die. I love when the viewer's cosy morality gets a knock and Game of Thrones is great for that.

You Have a Deadly Mission Maybe Involving Certain People Somehow

Imagine a twenty year old Mafia soldier stays up all night eating nachos and drinking while watching James Bond movies and Our Man Flint. He sleeps through half the day and when he wakes up he's had a dream he wants to turn into a movie. The mob's willing to finance it only on the condition that he incorporate Sophia Loren somehow. Without knowing any of the facts, this is how I imagined 1979's Firepower got made. A film about a superhuman mob hitman hired by the CIA to capture one of the wealthiest men in the world. And Sophia Loren is in almost every scene for no apparent reason. It's a bad, softball, conservative fantasy film but it's fascinating. It was released sixteen days after I was born.

Much like Our Man Flint, we see far too much of James Coburn's legs in this movie. He plays the Mafia hitman, Fanon. He also plays Fanon's identical twin brother, Eddie, whom Fanon assigns to show up at airports and things apparently as a decoy but not only does the guy not seem to fool anyone there's never a scene in the movie where a villain goes, "Wait, how can he be two places?" The twin is set up in the plot and then just forgotten.

This movie certainly isn't lacking for star power--In addition to Coburn and Loren there's also Eli Wallach, Billy Barty, Jake LaMotta, and Victor Mature in his final role--although really it's only a cameo and he doesn't speak. Eli Wallach comes off best, as the mob boss for whom Fanon works, his grandiose cunning spills out of the frame.

O.J. Simpson plays Fanon's sidekick, Catlett. He's black. That's about all there is to his character. Actually, to be more accurate, he seems like someone who's been black for about three days and he's still really tickled by the novelty. In a James Bondish casino scene, he enters wearing a tuxedo and says to Fanon, indicating his outfit: "Ebony magazine. What the distinguished young man is wearing."

Fanon laughs and says, "Uh huh. Just like a waiter from an Alabama chicken restaurant." I suppose this is all supposed to be better than Stepin Fetchit because Catlett can rig explosives.

And Sophia Loren was there. She plays a woman named Adele and the movie begins with her husband being killed by Stegner--the super wealthy guy Fanon's hired to capture. For no apparent reason, Stegner's people invite her to stay with them in Antigua, an invitation she accepts in the hopes of getting closer to her husband's killer. Then she starts secretly working for the CIA and with Fanon, whom she goes to see clandestinely on the deck of his boat in full view of everyone in town.

She has a love scene with Fanon--one of the most intensely awkward love scenes I've ever seen. Loren looks great and she seems really relaxed--probably because a vacation in Antigua was part of the job if not the job--but to say she and Coburn have no chemistry is like saying I'm probably never going to meet Joan of Arc. After the casino, he's in her room and offers to help her take off her earrings. "When I take off my earrings I go to bed," she says. Fanon laughs and leaves. Later, she enters his room, the music swells to hysterical levels as she removes her earrings with the passion of a gas station attendant cleaning a windscreen inter-cut with extreme close-ups of Coburn grinning like a hyena.

Things happen. There's a really awkward cameo by Jake LaMotta who answers a phone. I have to say Robert De Niro brilliantly captured LaMotta's completely lifeless performance style at the end of Raging Bull.

Stegner, the villain, is established as someone who's never seen--no-one knows what he looks like. At one point, we learn only two people in the world do, which to me doesn't sound particularly useful. What if one of those two people double-cross him, which of course happens? How's he supposed to keep his organisation together? This movie was credited to British director Michael Winner. I wonder if anyone on set knew what he looked like.

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The Hazards of Practicality

Saw this at the mall yesterday. I'm not sure what they were selling, I think makeup. I should have asked if they had any Rheingold.

I went to the mall for lunch, mainly as a pretext for exercise--I parked far away from the food court and put a few staircases in my route. One of the nice things about going to school was parking so far off campus so I knew at least a couple days a week I'd get a decent amount of walking in. It's a shame I live somewhere now where there's nothing within a reasonable walking distance--I need to drive somewhere to walk, at least I need to drive somewhere to walk for more than the sake of walking.

Thursday I was in all day colouring and my back felt it by the end. I've been finding plenty of things to listen to while I colour--yesterday I listened to The Renaissance Man, a Doctor Who audio play featuring Tom Baker as the Doctor and Louise Jameson as Leela. Unlike the first one I listened to, Destination: Nerva, this one, written by Justin Richards, feels less like fan-fiction for the late 70s era of the series. It feels slightly like modern Who, actually--the Fourth Doctor even uses one of the Tenth's catch phrases, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," which was certainly odd to hear. But it had a much nicer, very Science Fiction idea, to chew on than Destination: Nerva, too.

The Doctor and Leela travel to an extraterrestrial museum, rather similar to the First Doctor serial The Space Museum, except this museum features only artefacts from Earth. When they arrive, the Doctor and Leela are surprised to find no museum but instead a manor house and a woman hunting for butterflies with a net. Of course, things aren't what they seem and the story that unravels ends up being kind of a satisfying parody of the Internet, emphasising the difference between knowledge and wisdom.

Leela continues to have a much more proactive role than she had in the series, her combat expertise instrumental in several important moments. And it was funny how she kept saying, "The runny science man." But the climax definitely belongs to Baker.

I see on Wikipedia that new Fourth Doctor audio plays are planned all the way through 2016, including a series featuring Lalla Ward as my favourite companion, Romana II. Considering Ward and Baker were married and are now divorced it'll be interesting to see how much they can recapture their wonderful chemistry.

The Liberated Nesuko

I'm not finished with The Casebook of Boschen and Nesuko Issue #3 yet--I spent all day colouring yesterday and I should finish colouring it to-day but I still need to draw the cover. However, since this is Friday the 13th and next Friday is Errol Flynn's birthday, I'm going to be posting free html versions of the comic every Friday from now on beginning to-day. Every Friday I'll post another chapter, usually around eight pages, though Chapter 3 will be nine pages because Issue #1 is twenty-five pages long. I'm hoping this will enable more people to read the comic since I know DriveThru Comics is kind of a pain in the ass (and I see the site is down to-day due to heavy traffic). I received a sort of tentative acceptance e-mail from Comixology a few months ago for Casebook but it was on the condition that I polish up my lettering. Since I'm already doing the best lettering I can do I don't see a Comixology version being available any time soon. But I'm not sure Comixology is any less of a pain in the ass than DriveThru Comics, though at least there maybe it's not impossible to view even the titles of Adult category comics without logging in.

Anyway, as I said, next week is Errol Flynn's birthday and Robin Hood approves of free comics. So enjoy.

Death In the Concrete and Lusty Shadows

There are men who have no conception of compassion, who occasionally derive pleasure by causing pain to others but it's more accurate to say they judge human beings simply on potential to entertain. That's Tommy Udo who personifies a bigger shadow hanging over mob crook Nick Bianco in 1947's Kiss of Death, a film noir that pushed the boundaries imposed by censorship at the time to show even repentance can't save a man from the choices he made in the past. With a tight script co-written by Ben Hecht, the film is a fast ride to Hell.

Those familiar with Richard Widmark from later films will be surprised to see what a truly frightening portrayal of a psychopath he offers in this film as Tommy Udo. His strange giggle and not only comfort but extreme joy in committing murder are a big part of the feeling of omnipresent danger when Nick (Victor Mature) rats on the mob he and Tommy are part of. Even after Nick is living under a different name, we know he and his family are never safe from Tommy. A big part of that is how successfully Tommy's personality comes across but the impression is also assisted by the great number of location shots in New York City helping to lend the film a credibly anarchic quality.

This is after the movie had already given us a suicide by one innocent character--there's a sense this might be a karmic retribution of sorts for Nick's misdeeds but Nick's anxieties are worse for his uncertainty on the subject. Mature is good in the film as a man who's good at making hard decisions but has nonetheless found himself cornered by life.

Coleen Gray is the female lead and she's sweet, particularly in a scene where she tells Nick kissing him always makes her feel like she's about to faint. But she's saddled with the boring pure good hearted girl role, essentially becoming one of Nick's daughters when she becomes his lover. She has the distracting, pre-Method fake cry, too, that falls a little flat when we're supposed to be concerned for the pain all this is causing the innocent little lady. Moira Shearer, on the DVD commentary for The Red Shoes, recalls director Michael Powell being angry with her when she actually cried for her climactic scene in that 1948 movie. It's strange to compare that to-day to 1999's Eyes Wide Shut where Nichole Kidman locked herself in a bathroom and cried for hours just so she could get credibly red and puffy eyes and nose.

But attitudes were already changing in the 40s considering, as I said, Kiss of Death has many location shots instead of the familiar artificial Hollywood sound-stage and backlot environment, although the location shots are not as copious as those in 1948's The Naked City.

Artifice has its value, too--the movie also uses a lot Expressionistic shadow as part of its brilliant portrait of the world where doing the right thing can sometimes just make things a lot worse. A lifelong, desperate moral free for all in which Tommy Udo is a gleeful agent for a terrible, fundamental truth.

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Don't Let the Allosaurus Eat Raquel Welch

Dinosaurs and women in leather bikinis lived in desperate struggle for existence in our dream of buried pre-history. 1966's One Million Years B.C. presents a unique world of stop motion dinosaurs and grunting, half naked men and women, hardly different from the gigantic animals they share a dangerous environment with. It's a lot of fun.

The story follows Tumak (John Richardson) who's exiled from his tribe of hairy, cave dwelling brunettes and wanders the dangerous wastes before reaching the sea and falling in with a tribe of blondes who like seafood. The seafood that's small enough for them to kill, anyway.

Tumak begins a romance with one of them, Loana (Raquel Welch), seen here rescuing him from the giant sea turtle.

There's essentially no dialogue in the movie, the characters communicating almost entirely by grunts and saying one another's names. But since this is fantasy pre-history, Welch wears skins fitted for the maximum appeal of which modern technology is capable and her hair has obviously seen a stylist.

Somewhat more puzzling are the trimmed bangs most of the men have in the movie which are neither flattering or realistic.

The silent drama of the cave people is interesting enough but the relationships between the dinosaurs are even better--and only slightly less civilised. Animated by Ray Harryhausen, the stop motion creatures have wonderfully distinct personalities, the best scene being a fight between an Allosaurus and a Triceratops.

The Allosaurus has a strategy, using its greater agility to get around the Triceratops who's trying to get a straight path to ram the other beast. Meanwhile, Tumak and Loana cower in a crevasse.

In addition to the dinosaurs and Raquel Welch, the film has the terrific visuals of the Canary Islands where the exteriors were shot, a fascinatingly brutal environment of jagged rock and reddish sand.

A Lot of Riding Going On

Few sheriffs eschew gun wielding for whittling, even fewer do it successfully, and one imagines in the Wild West it would have been particularly hazardous. And yet Tom Destry in 1939's Destry Rides Again not only pulls it off but proves to be effective in a particularly crime ridden town. The premise doesn't really function in a reasonable manner but it's still a really good movie anyway.

Marlene Dietrich stars as Frenchy, saloon performer and unofficial boss of the town who, with her boyfriend Kent, routinely cheats people at cards. Released the same year as Ninotchka, the movie that aimed to rework Greta Garbo's career, Destry Rides Again shows us an unprecedentedly fun Marlene Dietrich. The actresses whose fame in the late 1920s was based on being cool and aloof now found themselves in a landscape altered by movies like It Happened One Night and the Astaire/Rogers musicals. People wanted comedy with their romance and leading ladies willing to get into a scrap. And does Dietrich ever get into a scrap.

One of the highlights of the film is a really vicious brawl between Frenchy and Lily Belle (Una Merkel) who's angry with Frenchy for winning her husband's pants in a game of poker. It's up to Destry (Jimmy Stewart) to break up the fight by pouring a bucket of water on the two ladies.

The legendary natural affability of Stewart's seems to be his main tool of law enforcement in lieu of the guns he doesn't carry. Stewart kind of makes it work with shear presence though even he can't make a scene work where Destry borrows the pistols from a thug to show him that he, Destry, is actually a crack shot, blowing some posts off a sign at distance. Then he returns to the guns to the thug and warns him not to start any trouble. Under the unlikely scenario that a sheriff in this town would be in any way effective while not carrying guns surely it would be better not to let people know that you'd be really dangerous if you got armed one day.

One thinks of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird who avoided using guns despite being an expert marksman. The crucial difference between the two stories is that To Kill a Mockingbird is about complex, credibly rendered people while Destry is up against two dimensional movie Western villains.

The movie exists in a vague territory between real action adventure logic and comedy logic--it was still a frontier for cinema at this point. But the chemistry between Stewart and Dietrich really works. Dietrich in particular is great at being smart, sexy, and funny all at once and she has some really cool musical numbers.

No Water Under the Bridge

I've decided to try and stick it out in the apartment for the five hours the running water's been shut off to-day. Just one hour to go, so far so only slightly awkward. I've been using a pitcher and the bathroom sink like an old fashioned pitcher and wash basin. Considering I shave with a straight razor I'd be a total anachronism here if it weren't for all the stuff I've been doing on the computer. I filled the pitcher before the water was shut off, if it doesn't come back on I guess I'll need to look for a well.

I liked last night's Game of Thrones, though not as much as "Blackwater", the previous big battle episode directed by Neil Marshall. One thing I really love about the show is how it takes all the glamour out of revenge. I love a good revenge fantasy, I'm a huge Tarantino fan, but I think people too often forget that life is too complicated to facilitate the cleanliness of even Tarantino's typically very thorny paths of revenge.

Spoilers after the screenshot

The series has accrued a massive cache of revenge-lust in the heart of Arya and as her desires are routinely thwarted or delayed we see how revenge has gone wrong for other people--most notably Oberyn in "The Mountain and the Viper". In "The Watchers on the Wall", in a bit that diverges from the book, we have a little boy getting revenge for the murder of his father. Now, how could that go wrong? Well, the person he kills is Ygritte, a character we love even after she's killed a bunch of innocent people as well as a few people we actually know and don't hate. Okay, she's a beautiful woman, but really, why should we feel bad if she's killed? For the simple reason that the conflict we see in her is very human. It's easy to watch John Wayne shoot a bunch of guys who are about as complicated as lunch boxes. It's never that simple in life.

The fight choreography was a thousand times better than in the previous episode's duel, very likely due to Marshall's presence behind the camera. And I loved the giants with their mammoths.

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