Kind Of Beat

When Beat culture came to Britain it probably looked nothing like 1960's Beat Girl. Slightly more upscale than one of Ed Wood's issue films, this one began development as an exploitation film about strippers but somewhere along the way it was decided it was going to pretend to have a serious view on the post war youth counterculture. The writing is terrible, its insights completely superficial, but it does have a nice cast, including David Farrar and Christopher Lee. The star of the film, Gillian Hills, would later become a pop star in France and make some appearances in much better films than this.

A very young and skinny Oliver Reed also has a tiny role, seen here dancing with Jennifer (Hills). He's among the group of miscreants she hangs out with at the coffee bar where another boy "improvises" Elvis Presley knock-off songs. There's some discussion about kicks and World War II that sound like they came from a fifty year old Martian who read a fifteen page description of the Beats. Two of them commiserate over imagining their mothers hiding in bomb shelters. The screenwriter presumably felt the psychological issues the Beats were dealing with had entirely to do with the thought of their parents getting hurt.

The movie opens with Jennifer's father, Paul (Farrar), who's on his way home on a train with his twenty four year old new French wife, Nichole (Noelle Adam). They seem like a nice enough couple and Paul tells Nichole about his anxieties regarding his wayward daughter. When the three are in a room together, the film gives Jennifer some points by giving Paul one really obnoxious character trait to justify the girl's otherwise random surliness.

He starts waxing eloquent about this city he's designed. "You know, psychologists think that most human neuroses come from too much contact with other humans," is the dubious motive played completely straight he offers to Nichole. "I call it 'City 2000'. Grime, filth, poverty, noise, hustle, and bustle--these things would be unknown. An almost silent place. Soundproofed with the use of flying bevelled walls of concrete which also serve to cut wind and rain." I'd say he was written absurdly over the top but judging from how new parts of cities have been put together over the decades since then the film seems prophetic in this regard.

Nichole tries to make friends with Jennifer with the usual "young step mom" plot tension. When Jennifer finds out Nichole may have been a stripper--and Paul doesn't know--the movie starts to pick up steam with its real focus. Jennifer manages to talk her way into the strip club across from the coffee bar despite being underage. Christina Aguilera recently claimed to have invented twerking but I'd say this lady arguably has a claim:

We see a few lovely girls on stage whose dancing talents are well above the divey strip club this is supposed to be. They strip down to pasties before Christopher Lee finally shows up as the sleazy proprietor who tries to enlist Jennifer even after finding out she's underaged.

And Hills really was underaged, she was sixteen--unusual for a film from this era, Jennifer is a teenager played by a teenager. Which explains why in a later scene, when she strips for her friends, there's a body double. Though the double doesn't strip past her bra and panties and we see Hills in her underwear in an earlier scene. What's even stranger is the double is extremely obvious; she has a completely different hairstyle.

In this BFI interview from two years ago Hills talks about taking her clothes off for the famous scene in Antonioni's Blow-Up a few years later, which was followed by her taking part in the vigorous menage a trois in A Clockwork Orange.

When I talked to Antonioni, at first I had no inkling he’d ever use me; it was just a lovely chat with this wonderfully talented person. When he offered me the role, at first I turned it down, I just didn’t think I could undress. But then I realised I’d just turned 21 and I could do whatever the hell I wanted. I had to call up his secretary and get her to intercept the letter.

The interviewer says Hills in Beat Girl was "the first believable teenager on British screens." Which makes me wonder if he's ever seen Brighton Rock. Hills doesn't exactly give a bad performance but Steve McQueen was a more believable teenager in The Blob.

When a Boy's Fancy Turns to Fighting!

When a boy can't have sex or masturbate, what else can he do but fight? 1966's Fighting Elegy (けんかえれじい) is the story of an earnest Catholic lad desperately picking fights all over town. It's part of an effort to curb all the nervous energy that seems to build up after he vows not to pleasure himself. Set in 1935 on the eve of Japan's war with China, Seijun Suzuki directs this film with an appropriately breakneck pace, hitting a perfect mix of comedy and drama.

Kiroku (Hideki Takahashi) is a delinquent staying at a Catholic boarding house where he's fallen in love with the beautiful, spiritually pure daughter of the landlady, Michiko (Junko Asano).

In the middle of the film, Suzuki puts together one scene that neatly describes the premise--Michiko playing piano with her rapturous face turned upward, her back to Kiroku sitting rigidly, trying to contain himself, sweating profusely. In voice over narration he vows never, ever to masturbate, after which he rushes outside where Suzuki leaves the camera exposure high so we can barely see him beating up two other boys through the blinding haze of white. Then he comes back to the room where he can sit somewhat more comfortably behind the still contentedly playing Michiko.

Kiroku joins a gang--he fights with a rival gang, he fights with the members of his own gang until he becomes leader. He's transferred to another school where he insults the whole town to everyone he meets, leading to an extended fight scene in a garden where an elderly couple look on astonished. He refuses to wear shoes during military drills.

Some moments are surprisingly, weirdly sweet, like a scene where Kiroku, alone on a hillside street, screams Michiko's name but stops at every syllable to grab the sound from the air and put it to his lips. He never resents her or Catholicism or his gang--he never seems angry, he just . . . wants . . . to . . . fight. All the time.

The film ends a bit abruptly, Suzuki having intended to continue the story in a sequel which was never made. The studio fired him for making the experimental classic, Branded to Kill, before he had the chance. Maybe in a way it's appropriate to have just this first part of a story, bursting with energy left unfulfilled.

Twitter Sonnet #1116

Examined stones reveal a science stopped.
Descending like a kerchief, ice appeared.
The gauzy petals cling to shoes to hop.
Transmission veins create the real and weird.
Exchanging hats, a pair of birds relate.
A parrot copped a turtle's secret thought.
A fleet of bottles could at home await.
A single board succumbed to phantom rot.
A softened shell revealed a mussel fit.
Prepared for poison, healthy cops arrive.
The evidence was cotton in the kit.
The Earth was only spinning for the hive.
A hasty face reported eyes or nose.
A careful foot displays its wrinkled toes.

The Fat of the Skull

Of all the pirate names to inspire fear on the seven seas, "Puddin' Head" ranks pretty low. But the film featuring that character, 1952's Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd, is a decent pirate adventure. It succeeds more at that than at comedy, in fact, but Abbott and Costello are always a delight.

It seems heavily influenced by two pirate films from the two years before its release--Treasure Island and Anne of the Indies. This is in spite of the fact that Charles Laughton here reprises his role as Captain Kidd from the 1945 film of that name but aside from Laughton being in the role there's nothing to associate this Kidd with the historical Kidd or even the embellished version. In this film, Kidd has a friendly relationship with Anne Bonny somewhat like the one between Blackbeard and Bonny in Anne of the Indies.

Hillary Brooke as Bonny lacks the pluck of Jean Peters in the role but she at least exudes an air of authority convincing enough to make it funny that she falls head over heels for Lou Costello--a.k.a. Puddin' Head.

There's the usual obligatory straight pair of lovers--in this case Bruce (Bill Shirley) and Jane (Fran Warren) who are especially dull. But the plot is set in motion when Puddin' accidentally swaps a love note from Jane with Kidd's map to a buried treasure on Skull Island. After the initial mix-up it does get a lot funnier as the film continually contrives reasons for the two items to get mixed up again and again.

Laughton surprisingly really shines in this film for his comedic instincts. He's much more effective then Lon Cheney Jr. or Boris Karloff for this reason--Laughton's Kidd is truly amphibious, at ease with terrorising bluster as in screwy antics. He may partly have Robert Newton to thank for taking the pirate archetype more in that direction but Laughton is no light weight performer. As he remarks himself--when he sees Puddin' he remarks how he hates fat men. Bonny points out he's fat to which Kidd replies, "And I hate m'self!"

The colour, by SuperCinecolor, is really nice, enabling cinematographer Stanley Cortez (who also worked on The Magnificent Ambersons, Night of the Hunter, and Chinatown) to create a ghostly chiaroscuro more like Moonfleet than The Crimson Pirate, which is certainly my preference. And it works surprisingly well with some extended comedy routines between Laughton and Costello in the last portion of the film that feel like they were created late in production when people realised how well Laughton took to this.

Stolen Cars and Dizzy Madness

To a young person, morality can seem so crystal clear that quick, extreme actions seem perfectly reasonable for any transgression. So in 1960's Everything Goes Wrong (すべてが狂ってる, "everything is crazy"), also known as The Madness of Youth, a teenage boy feels bitter disgust when his mother starts sleeping with a man who designed a tank responsible for accidentally killing the boy's father during World War II. And that's just one of the things going wrong in this film. It's a film that might have been a ridiculous melodrama but works out to be a really effective portrait of troubled teenagers in Japan at the end of the 50s. Seijin Suzuki's bold stylistic choices and frenetic editing make the improbable string of events seem like dream logic, the film like a nightmare.

The boy is Jiro (Tamio Kawaji) who tells himself he's not so old fashioned that it bothers him his mother is sleeping with a married man--though he calls his mother a whore for taking money from the man. He claims to be bothered by the man's line of work. Like many Japanese films of the 50s and 60s, this one is trying to find its own way of digesting the war and the increasing influence of American culture.

Jiro, like Travis Bickle, is comfortable with a personal philosophy of zero tolerance even as he's a mess of contradictions himself. He rebels by joining a gang of car thieves. After successfully stealing his first car, he finds out the gang's initiation ritual is for the new thief to sleep with one of the girls in the gang. The movie spends a lot of time focusing on how consensual this is--we see one girl going home crying while three boys brag about gang banging her. Toshimi (Yoshiko Nezu), the girl we get to know best in the film, talks about how she wasn't sure if sometimes she really wanted to sleep with a boy or if she was just telling herself she did. As she got more accustomed to the gang life, though, she soon wasn't hesitating from helping to force new girls.

A shy girl hops onto the bar with Jiro--she seems to be his willing "prize" but the worldlier Toshimi pushes the girl aside and takes the reluctant Jiro to a love motel.

It turns out Jiro's not so progressive about sex as he thinks he is and he tries to insult Toshimi by giving her money. She's genuinely into him, though, heaven knows why, and she refuses the money despite the fact that she needs it for her friend Etsuko (Shinako Nakagawa) who needs it for an abortion.

Things start to get improbable when Etsuko tries to shake down Nanbara (Shinsuke Ashida)--the same man who's sleeping with Jiro's mother. After this the movie has car chases, murder, and sex, all presented a little too weirdly to be merely sensational. With feverish closeups and quick but evocative cuts, Suzuki's cinematic language turn this into a fascinating, dreamlike hell.

Robots Bring Zombies and Disorder

Nowadays television and movies have us well prepared for a day when we wake up and find most of the populace is either dead or mindless walking corpses. It was somewhat unusual, though, when 1964's The Earth Dies Screaming was released. This entertaining and oddly short post-apocalyptic film by Terence Fisher features a small, random assortment of people trying to figure out this suddenly strange world around them.

Shot and set in England, the film has an American at its centre, a middle aged test pilot named Jeff Nolan (Willard Parker). He's introduced without any preamble and it's almost like watching a silent film as we watch him drive up in a military jeep and wander around. He's as puzzled as we are by the sight of bodies scattered about the silent village.

Gradually a group of people accumulates around Jeff who's treated as leader by default. They compare notes about what they were doing at the time of whatever it is that happened to the rest of the population. I felt like the movie was trying to subtly suggest a weirder explanation than the one we end up getting, one of the things that makes me wonder if the film's runtime, barely over an hour, was intended to be so short from the start.

One thing that's certainly weird are the robots wandering around in space suits. They don't seem especially interested in the group until one of them, a society woman who'd been coming home from a party (Vanda Godsell) persistently pesters one. Later she becomes one of the zombies that roam the land--though not called zombies. But they are pretty close to the Night of the Living Dead style walking corpses introduced in George Romero's film four years later. Earth Dies Screaming's version has bulging white eyes and are pretty creepy.

There's another effective scene where another member of the group (Peggy Hatton) hides in a closet from such a zombie and she peers fearfully through a lattice while the it searches the room for her. It kind of reminded me of playing Alien: Isolation.

The group is nicely and credibly put together. Dennis Price plays a man with a sinister ulterior motive which for some reason the film never gets around to revealing and Thorley Walters plays an amusing, befuddled alcoholic. There's also a young pregnant woman in the group (Anna Palk). In one scene I thought effective Jeff watches her from outside while he's standing guard as she nervously gets some milk from a refrigerator. It's a nice moment with no dialogue that conveys how Jeff takes some simple pleasure in the sight of someone acting in a familiar domestic manner. Which makes it all the more effective when one of the robots in space suits shows up.

The Many Shades of the Expanse

Last night gave us a new episode of The Expanse that was the opposite of last week's filler episode. Lots of stuff happened this time--really well executed stuff. SyFy already looked like assholes last week for cancelling The Expanse, they look colossally obnoxious now. In the unlikely event that someone else doesn't pick up the series, this one is destined to sit alongside shows like Firefly and Farscape. It'll cement a beloved legacy for the show while crystallising the image of the suits behind the cancelling as clueless dicks.

Spoilers behind the screenshot

Or maybe, like Gillis (Jonathan Whittaker), they'll preserve their reputation by the timely reveal of a powerful traitor like Errinwright (Shawn Doyle). I liked that scene although I didn't believe someone as cagey as Gillis would openly tell Anna (Elizabeth Mitchell) how glad he was to have someone to take the PR hit. But it was kind of worth it for the "Oh . . . shit" look on her face.

Still, she's probably better off with a guy who wants to do the right thing to look good than with the guy who apparently is committed on an ideological level. The Expanse often questions how really constructive it is to be dedicated to an ideal, to be pragmatic, or to be impulsive. One of the weaker points in the episode, Amos (Wes Chatham) with his "I am that guy" moment, executing the doctor who'd experimented on children so Prax (Terry Chen) wouldn't have to, was predictable but again demonstrated how moral purity doesn't get the job done--or possibly gets the wrong job done. But, like John Wayne in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, Amos sees there needs to be Praxes who aren't "that guy".

For some much more effective gunplay, we had Bobbie (Frankie Adams) and her cat and mouse with that poor kid who'd become a protomolecule hybrid. This sequence was way better than anything in the new Avengers movie because the action always made it clear exactly what each participant was capable of and what their motivation was. Bobbie's rear view camera on her helmet was nicely used, trusting an audience probably used to video games to follow it. And everything was coordinated so we had a sense of how fast Bobbie could move in comparison to the monster. A really effective sequence.

The action sequence on the Agatha King was pretty good, too, with that poor plucky UNN sailor (Sydney Meyer) we barely got to know. Meanwhile, Alex (Cas Anvar) and Naomi (Dominique Tipper) made it to the funkiest bridge in the galaxy.

I'm not sorry to see Admiral Nguyen (Byron Mann) go. Not so much because he's despicable as that he's more two dimensional than the villains back on Earth.

The end of the episode was good in spite of what looked like the most awkward post-coital cuddle I've ever seen on television.

I know the bunks are small but those two look like hastily stashed department store mannequins. Not much room for expanse there. I do like how consistently Holden's (Steven Strait) nose has stayed red since it was punched a couple episodes back. I love this show's attention to detail.

Close Shadows and Inmates

Is it selfish to be angry all the time? What if anger is the only sensible response to a ridiculous and dying world? 1959's Look Back in Anger, based on John Osborne's play, doesn't spend much time explicitly talking about the past but one scene where one of the story's more mild mannered characters vaguely observes "Something's gone wrong somewhere, hasn't it?" seems to point to a fundamental decline in the state of things. I couldn't help thinking of the origin story put forth in episode eight of the new Twin Peaks--like the Beats in the U.S., a culture that seems very much to've influenced the world depicted in Look Back in Anger, there's a sense of something having gone wrong with the fundamental fabric of human society for which everyone is paying a price on a deeply personal level. The film resolves a little too cleanly for my taste, something that later "Angry Young Man" films seem to improve upon, and some of the supporting characters could've used more fleshing out, but this beautifully photographed film centres on one fascinating character played by Richard Burton.

Burton plays Jimmy, a young man who earns a meagre living from a market stall despite being a university graduate. His two flatmates are his wife, Alison (Mary Ure), and a young Welshman named Clff (Gary Raymond). Later, Alison's friend, Helena (Clarie Bloom), joins them and in one conversation between Helena and Cliff, I got the sense of the two being governors of opposing political philosophy of the state populated by Jimmy and Alison. Cliff tells Helena how hard he's worked to keep Alison and Jimmy together and Helena doesn't understand why.

Jimmy is constantly in a rage. He channels it into his trumpet playing in a local club--his admiration for the great jazz musicians of the day, seen in posters for Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson that decorate the walls of the flat, seems another page taken from the Beats. He also takes out his anger by deliberately insulting his wife and friends; in his calling Alison a "cow" constantly he displays a casual misogyny designed more to hurt people around him than to sell them on any heartfelt philosophy. He hates Helena even more, his insults suggesting he sees her as morally smug though we never learn very much about her. Presumably he feels that way about her because she's been trying to get Alison to leave him.

Jimmy also sublimates his anger into fighting for an Indian immigrant named Kapoor (S.P. Kapoor) who works in the same market. He constantly receives unfair treatment from the market inspector played by a young Donald Pleasence. Kapoor provides an clear external manifestation of the corruption of reality Jimmy perceives at all times.

There's also the influence of young misfit American films at work like The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause and Richard Burton shows a Shakespearean actor can give the method actors a run for their money. Even when he and Cliff are messing around with a double act they've rehearsed for their own amusement one senses the constant undercurrent of resentment in Jimmy. He always seems to be picking at the people around him, as though desperate to find they, too, have the anger beneath their complacent masks.

Alison and Jimmy aren't always fighting and when they make up they tend to do a strange role play where he pretends to be a bear and she a squirrel, seemingly a reference to Ibsen's A Doll's House. Since this seems the only time the two are comfortable with each other and their relationship, one wonders if Osborne is making a point about what was lost when this game was cast aside in A Doll's House.

In the Wikipedia entry for the song, there's an uncited note that says David Bowie's "Look Back in Anger" has nothing to do with Osborne's play. If that's true, then all the resonance the lyrics have with the story must be an extraordinary coincidence. Certainly I hate Oasis' "Don't Look Back in Anger" even more now. The Bowie song has something in the fury that builds in a constant state of forced stasis and gradual decay that certainly seems to be part of the film.

Twitter Sonnet #1114

The minute hand banana peeled the watch.
A time appointed classic brass to tack.
An idle sprint suspends at needed Scotch.
Direction eased for wind and falling slack.
Spaghetti arms can hold a saucy kid.
Appointed pasta kneels before the pot.
A boiled face emerged beneath the lid.
A mind assembled dinner serves a lot.
The empty picture frame remembers glass.
A station stopped beside a moving train.
The faces of the ticket slowly pass.
An anger came to market all in vain.
A retrospective soured well and bad.
A rainy time and long the lodgers had.

The Life of Lois

After hearing Margot Kidder passed away yesterday I decided to watch Superman II again last night (the Donner cut). The first film's better than either version of the sequel but I feel like Kidder has more screentime in II, despite being fifth or sixth billed. This is probably do to other actors' agents being better negotiators, leveraging clout for higher profiles. Thankfully to-day actors seem to have too much shame to pull that kind of thing.

Superman II is a movie about shame, Marlon Brando's ghost (in the Donner version) imbuing Superman with the sense of duty--telling him virtue is its own reward in an earlier scene, setting up the idea that having a relationship with Lois is too selfish. To be fair, a relationship does take a lot of time and Kal-El probably already wastes too much time being Clark Kent. There are probably at least a million horrible things happening every minute in the world that would benefit from Superman's attention.

Still, it's weird to stick to such a point of logic when we're talking about a movie where Superman can reverse time by reversing the Earth's rotation and it seems to take an hour for that kid to fall down Niagara Falls. And Margot Kidder looks so sweet in the super shirt.

Richard Donner, director of the first film, was fired from the second film and replaced by Richard Lester, who received credit for the theatrical version released in 1981, despite a lot of footage having been shot by Donner. Donner finally released a cut in 2006 which, among other things, restored Marlon Brando's scenes to the film--he'd been entirely cut in the Lester version. But there are a lot of other differences, too, like the fact that the first scene with Kidder and Reeve is entirely different.

I'll admit the juicer scene in the Lester version is a little funnier than the scene in the Donner one where Lois starts to figure out Clark bears an uncanny resemblance to Superman. But I like the energy of the Donner version better. Nothing quite equals the His Girl Friday inspired tone in the first film's first scenes with Lois but Donner maintains a sweetly innocent tone that every incarnation of Superman since has taken itself too seriously to attempt. Even though Lois drawing glasses on a picture of Superman clearly seems to have been inspired by a thousand conversations people've likely had that began with, "Why doesn't Lois ever . . . ?" It's the story playing catch up with the too clever audience but at the same time reminding us that such nitpicking misses the point.

Kidder never seems dumb when she's not seeing the Superman behind the bumbling Clark--she had the sense to play it straight and like the screwball comedies that inspired most of her scenes with him there's plenty of other things going on to distract her from examining him. Why should he be the centre of the universe? The common criticism is that Clark is a long term joke Superman is playing on Lois but in the Donner films the persona is almost like a form of self-punishment, an exercise in keeping himself humble. It's like he's silently pleading with Lois to be his dom but she hilariously has no time for it aside from a few random crumbs of cruelty. And kudos to Lois for not falling into that black hole. Kidder's performance in particular is as much a surpassingly human take on Lois as Reeve's is on Superman. In spite of my problems with the Zack Snyder films, I do think Amy Adams is good casting, but Margot Kidder is always the "real" Lois for me.